Buck Theorem's Hide-out

"The Exorcist"... or "the sexorcist" conversation.

2012-01-24T22:11:00.000Z

Ona train home after a night out, my good friend Screaming Joe Sangre and I endedup discussing “The Exorcist”. We talked about how cool Max von Sydow is and how people sometimes missed all the Dick Smith aging make-up he wore; how the Catholic Church endoresed the film, how the foley work and atmospherics were fantastic and how it was far more horror exploitation than some would credit it.

The next morning, Joe texted me, thinking how “TheExorcist” might be

sexist or ‘sexorcist’ in its attitude or play on feartowards female sexuality, female adolescence, etc. (the masturbating and how immoral it is, especially with what she uses [the crucifix]). I would have seen it asmore of a criticism on the church’s attitude rather than all the acclaim it’sgotten from the church.

Towhich I answered:

It is sexistbecause it’s earnest and buys into Catholicism, and all earnest religion ishorribly sexist. “The Exorcist” is all about The Men fighting Evil over thebody of an adolescent virgin. It treats puberty as a literal demonicpossession: early sexual awareness and experimentation (masturbation) isrepresented as a total (blasphemous) abomination. See also: bodily dischargesrepresented as disgusting pea green soup-vomit. Once the priests have martyredthemselves during exorcism, the girl returns to a pure, virginal state with nomemory of events (what, no vaginal damage)? What she’s being purged of is dirtylanguage and early sexuality – i.e., female maturity and independence.

Inever saw “The Exorcist” as critical of Catholicism, and certainly what I haveread around it seems to imply that Freidkin (director) and Blatty (writer oforiginal novel) both buy into it seriously. The Vatican has endorsed this film,which shows that (a) religion has a taste for horror, which is no surprise, and (b) they probablywouldn’t know how to see the film as a black comedy too. It is a fantastichorror, indeed, but I buy into its premise as much as I do “The Omen”. I doreserve the right to change my mind upon a fourth or fifth viewing of “The Exorcist”in regard to its earnestness (my memory does not store any impression of the filmbeing critical or) and as far as relgious horrors go (I don’t buy into them), “TheExorcist” is probably the best, which is ironically the result of the veryearnestness that I likely distrust.

Andthen I told Joe that he really has to see “Martyrs”.

Buck Theorem's "The Third Monster and other oddities"

2012-01-11T20:07:00.000Z

“This compilation contains 20 tales of mystery, horror, fantasies, monsters, nightmares and dreams. Ghosts both vengeful and sorrowful. Vampires of autumn and cinemas. Murderers who are terrible, horribly young, and occasionally bizarre. Strange big cats stalking dreams and suburbia. Living dolls hunting victims. Schools haunted by bullies. Desert castles and the living dead. Unusual holiday resorts and graves with relentless appetites. In the realms of the uncanny, you shall find all the oddities you could care for.”

THE THIRD MONSTER AND OTHER ODDITIES

Here is my second book of fiction. This one is one of those collections of horror and mystery and, I admit it, abit of whimsy, the origins of which lies in a couple of horror anthologies that I wrote when was between, perhaps, ten and eleven. I have always remembered a few of the stories that I wrote as a child for those collections and those stories appear in “The Third Monster and other oddities”, as well as a bunch of others that come from my youth, dreams and up to the zombie fads of the Twenty-First century. My affection for horror and the bizarre is life-long and shows no sign of going anywhere yet.

The joys of self-publishing haven’t lost their novelty as yet, so I hope you would enjoy this bit of nonsense, should you buy it from Lulu.

2011 - Best films seen and general notes

2011-12-23T22:52:00.008Z

Here is a list of the best films that I saw over 2011:

ATTACK THE BLOCK (2011)

13ASSASSINS
- more below

UNCLE BOONMEE WHO CAL RECALL HIS PAST LIVES (2010)
– glorious oddness. This is how magic-realism should be.

DRIVE (2011)

I SAW THE DEVIL (2010)

- Nasty and compelling serial killer/revenge flick that quite takes to task the vengeance motivation of most action narratives. Both gimmicky and deeply troubling.

DEEP END (1970)

- Fantastic 60s coming-of-age story with a wonderful swimming pool backdrop. Made me think of how few films there are about the experience of getting your first job.

A ROOM AND A HALF (2009)

- Visually stunning and sumptuous, stuffed full of detail and fancies and even a fantastic animated sequence. The sequence where pictures in a food book come to life is one of the most dazzling and sumptuous visuals I have seen in ages.

TINKER TAILOR SAILOR SPY (2011)

– stunning plot and made as if for adults! Tomas Alfredson is definitely a name I shall get excited about whenever it turns up.

STILL WALKING (2008)

– instantaneously one of my favourite domestic dramas crackling with unresolved tensions and the things that make families tender and shocking all at the same time.

THE PAGE TURNER (2006)

– icy French revenge domestic drama. Cruel and wonderfully performed.

And honourable mentions...

THE BURNING (1981) – a consummate 80s slasher. The lingers in the memory as a far better film that it probably is, but then again: the raft scene.

BLACK DEATH (2010) – an unsual horror which end up being a pitch-black character and social study.

MONSTERS (2010) – don’t let the title misguide your expectations. As a low-budget invented-from-nothing exercise, and as a portrayal of how people might live at the edges of a world taken over by a science-fiction premise, this was quietly stunning and original. Also perhaps the best romance I've seen in a film for a long, long time.

GORGO (1951) – the final act with Gorgo stomping all over London is fantastic and the match for any albeit more realistic contemporary effects sequences.

Yes, I know what I just said about the effects, but the destruction caused by Gorgo is very, very impressive, I assure. It's just that his model head isn't quite as great.

INTERPLANETARY (2008) – winning and funny low-budget sci-fi filler in the style of “Dark Star”

THE KILL LIST (2011) – oh, it definitely gets under your skin. Stay with it. Probably an instant classic.

SALVAGE (2009)

SEIGE OF THE DEAD (2010)

– because I like films that are about realistic people dealing realistically with impossible horror situations.

THE SAILOR WHO FELL FROM THE SEA (1976) – which is just very odd in and particularly English way. Probably misguided as a Mishima adaptation, but something about this kind of ‘60s British cinema remains quite uncanny and bizarre. They just don't make beguiling bafflements like this anymore.

The two films that I saw at the cinema that truly surprised me and blew me away this year were “Attack the Block” and “13 Assassins”.

Oh yes, I know that “TREE OF LIFE” (2011) is meant to be THE one, but it was broadcasting its own greatness so loudly that I just nodded and went on to others that genuinely surprised. I did not feel that the entirety of cinema had been reinvented just because Terence Malick had created a gorgeous stream-of-consciousness cinematic family album with some science-fiction pages thrown in for good measure. I thought the birth of the universe sequence was ravishing. I thought the family drama that takes up the centre of film was far more linear than I was given to expect, that it was pretty and as stirring as a fine piece of prose. I felt, as I was always bound to, that the religious symbolism was daft and stunted. Like all great art that gestures wildly at that very greatness, threatening narcissism, it seemed to think religious iconography was incisive and enlightening instead of obvious and narratively trite. This was not really an investigation into the faith of its characters for it was far too obtuse and, shall we say, airy-fairy for that. It is exactly the kind of film that critics can love because it allows them to wallow in the sound of their own voice (yes, yes, me too). It’s characters, aside from its Brad Pitt dad and the Malickesque son, were woefully two dimensional. People seem to go on about the mother’s “grace” as if that is all she needed: gestures and reductive symbolism over genuine characterisation. The third act also had the sound of collapsing in upon itself and leaving the audience behind as it turned deeper into naval-picking. On the other hand, as a cinematic evocation of memory in action, “Tree of Life” was a wonderful indulgence.

I was equally impressed with Gasper Noe’s “Enter The Void” (2009), which I was fortunate enough to see in the same week as Malick’s film and which I felt to be the evil twin of “Tree of Life”. That is, it was a film that relied upon a slender narrative to explore, with highly stylised and stunning visual conceit, its mostly abstract characters. Both films were extremely dreamy, indulgent, pleasurably overlong and frequently breathtaking. “Enter the Void” also offered a knock-out opening credits and first act. “How did they do that?” frequently came to mind.

Lars Von Trier’s “Melancholia” (2011) also offered a flip side to “Tree of Life”, as well as a stunning opening sequence that matched Malick for beauty and stylisation. Trier is a deeply compelling and divisive director and can really excel and transcend as few others can. His “Europa” remains one of my favourite and one of the most visually daring films I have ever seen. Around the time of “Breaking the Waves” and “Dancer in the Dark” – the latter which I really like, not least for Bjork’s overall contribution – he decided to use female emotional and mental instability to convey his own depression and, yes, melancholia. I am adverse to the somewhat misogynist conflation of female emotional and mental instability and especially that they are also transcendent in some manner. Von Trier is ordinarily saved by some excellent performances, and “Melancholia” hosts a number of great character turns, no matter how silly some of it may be. Its sense of narrative timing is timing – try to put the melancholic Kirsten Dunst’s disintegration on her wedding day on some kind of clock and see whether it seems possible – and if you do not take to the film, you can shove a planet through its weaknesses. But its weaknesses feel more like punk, just as Malick’s feel like classical. However, the cosmic symbolism and frequent beauty and the sheer audaciousness of the ending (not to mention ambiguity: futility or final understanding) makes this a fascinating watch.

Again, “Black Swan” (2010) was problematic for me for seemingly presenting psychological ill health with transcendence. Of course, it was a slummy giallo horror in a tutu and since people tend to prefer their horror in fancy garb and their female performances in meltdown, not to mention some obvious symbolism, it generally went down well and crossed over into the mainstream. I shall probably enjoy more it a second time around when its pretentions and craziness can be laughed at and enjoyed just like any other b-film.

Similarly, I always want to enjoy Pedro Almodovar films more than I evidently do. Something about the way he makes rape and murder as casual as his excellent female leads put on another dress or make lunch feels too divorced from reality to work for me. A kind of camp regard for all things taboo, but not quite with the same revelatory or satirical rewards as in the work of John Waters. Nevertheless, “The Skin I Live In” (2011) was a far more successful body-horror and ‘mad doctor/scientist’ film that Tom Six’s flat joke “The Human Centipede”. “The Skin I Live In” was a kind of camp Cronenberg-lite, but that is not a bad thing. The consequences of mental and emotional suffering were all over Almodovar’s tale of gender and trauma. It still did not possess the same stunning narrative pyrotechnics and rigorous plotting as “Bad Education”, but it was a fine b-movie horror that, despite its crass elements, was likely to provoke at least cursory thoughts about sexuality and how it defines us.

“Tyrannosaur” (2011) was quite the horror film in its British miserablism. Although well acted and filmed, it seemed to wallow without insight. It did possess a stunning performance by Olivia Colman, though.

I suppose “Hugo” (2011) appeared on a number of end of year top 10s because, well, film fans seem to enjoy films that trumpet how great film it. Or magical. I don’t really trust that Disneyesque or Speilbergian co-opting of that term “magical” because its feels like propaganda and earnt by cheap sentimentalism. It nearly capsized “Super 8” and nearly smothered “Hugo”, but not quite in either case. “Hugo” is too long: once it stops blaring about itself with big budget production and smothering the audience with visual pyrotechnics that serve no use to the small story at the centre, once it stops this and gives us a truly beautiful montage of George Georges Méliès going about the business of making and directing his silent films, the film has already past the point of being riveting and is very much a lot of pulling bunnies out of hats because the story has become inert. Nice, but that’s it. Also perverse: paying homage to the silent film era using crass and distracting 3-D.

“Super 8” (2011) was also a bit too in love with its own movie-ness. Fun, well made and mostly brought down to earth by its engaging young cast rather than the script. Also, a missed opportunity, surely: a CGI effects bonanza when actually the best moments of the film are when the kids are making their own zombie film on Super 8. The end credits Super 8 movie kinds puts all the giant monster and sentimentality to shame.

“Troll Hunter” (2010) was probably the best monster flick of the year. It also had the best scenery.

However, for amusement and nasty fun, Dick Maas's "Saint" (2010) had a lot going for it, not least of which was one of my favourite spectacles of the year: a demonic Santa Claus riding across the rooftops of Amsterdam on a horse.

“Drive” (2011) equally was less than the eye saw, but nevertheless a great piece of hokum and the kind of film that seems to have slipped from view.

“Thor” (2011) and “The Rise of the Planet of the Apes” (2011: clumsy, desperate title) were entertaining and diverting but disappeared into thin air upon reflection. The cinematic equivalent of a bag of crisps, I guess.

“The Thing” (2011) was good fun and did well to pretend it was more than just a cash-in. Mostly it did this by not having totally risible dialogue and characters who actually seemed to be thinking. And no, the CGI effects did not transcend those of the Carpenter film.

“Insidious” (2011) was appalling, despite a first half containing an excellent sequence of scares and great creep-outs.

Much, much better was “The Awakening” (2011) with its haunted school backdrop, elegant performances and direction, even if it ended up biting off more than it could chew.

Even better was Ti West’s “The Innkeepers” (2011), because its two central characters were some of the best ever put in a potential haunted building and for its patient development of eeriness and, yes, sadness and ambiguity.

So, for me it was “13 Assassins” and “Attack the Block” that truly rocked my world.

“13Assassins” (2010) reminded me of why Takashi Miike is one of my favourite directors.

“Attack the Block” came months before the London 2011 riots and it seemed to me to be the only British film that was tapped into the current social discontent and pending violent outbursts. Where was the other realist films truly and imaginatively conveying the alienation and barely repressed malcontent and, yes, conversational fun of kids on council estates (ghettos?). Beneath a daft alien invasion monster film (great, scary aliens!) Joe Cornish’s film turned a council estate into a visually arresting box of traps and spoke up on behalf of the generation of youths disparaged and hated by tabloid mentalities as well as holding them to account for their own wrong-doing. The more our protagonist Moses gains a conscience, the greater the number of aliens to battle. You didn’t have to think the film had any deeper level because it was also funny, nicely constructed and frequently genuinely gorgeous to look at. As a kind of kitchen-sink-drama-meets-Joe Dante experiment, “Attack the Block” reminded me of just how powerful genre symbolism and playfulness can be. I am aware that there are many that think it's just a silly monster movie. However, my love for this film is quite boundless.

DRIVE

2011-10-16T11:44:00.007+01:00

.
Nicolas Winding Refn
2011, USA

The turning point of Refn’s appropriation of Walter Hill and Michael Mann aesthetics, “Drive”, is surely the one scene that I initially felt to be the most problematic. The elevator scene seemed to me to encapsulate Andrew Tracey’s [Reverseshot] main objection to “Drive”: namely, it’s silliness. It is indeed the same silliness I felt afflicts some of the work of Michael Mann, whose male angst and posturing I find so unintentionally amusing (less damaging in “Manhunter”, but fatally marring “Heat”, for example). This glossy emotional gesticulating feels very much like the moody soft-pop-rock that Mann so favours on his soundtracks: appealing, easy, but ultimately shallow. Refn, too, uses an electronic soundtrack, a wonderful, retro-feeling Chris Martinez score. There’s also a silly but endearing song about heroes. However, one should not be misled that Refn is coopting Mann’s taste: throughout his career, Refn has utilised excellent, distinctive soundtracks and song choices (less self-satisfied than Tarantino; less soppy than Mann).

That pinnacle moment, the elevator scene, is where the soundtrack takes over and the movements of the characters fall into slow-motion to emphasise its poignancy. The driver and his love interest have just got into an elevator with a man who the driver knows to be a hoodlum sent to kill them. Now, at first the silliness seems to be in the way that the driver stops to steal a deep, long kiss in slow-motion rather than just deal with the hoodlum whilst he has the element of surprise. It is such a moment that critics in love with gestures rather than realism or character pragmatism really take to and buy into the sign-posted poignancy. If you are to read “Drive” for its gestures, then will probably be the great romantic moment, and certainly this is how Matt Bochenski [*littlewhitelies] reads it, without ambiguity or irony. He says, “Driver kisses her before turning on the other man. It’s a moment of exquisite and contradictory emotions – love, atonement, vengeance and rage – coalescing and combusting with startling ferocity.” Similarly, James Hansen [*Out 1 Film Journal] reads the driver as heroic. But this now brings to the controversy of “Drive”.

There is the amusing tale of the woman trying to sue the film distributor for leading her to believe she was going to see another “The Fast and The Furious” film. Well, entertaining as that is, one can see a certain point: when I first saw the trailer for “Drive”, I was as disinterested as I ordinarily am with any trailer going through its tedious litany of clichés; but then I saw it was directed by Refn, and I was interested, certain that it was being misrepresented, mispackaged. Which it was. Because the car chases are probably not what you are going to remember about “Drive”. One might even wish there had been more footage of his stunt driver work, and his heist work. But no: what likely to remember is the violence, because when “Drive” lets loose, it is extremely crunchy and violent. I see this again as further evidence of how the influence of ‘extreme cinema’ of the preceding decade has trickled upwards into more mainstream titles. Many of its detractors have turned aggressively against “Drive” in response to the shocking violence.

But it seems to me that the driver is not heroic, although he is an anti-hero. He is not simply romantically detached or mostly alienated from the world around him, in the old school manner of stoic, mostly silent troubled men of action who, nevertheless, live by a code. He is - as apparently Ryan Gosling also feels - psychotic. We know this as soon as he responds relentlessly, consummately during the motel attack. He has preternatural abilities with violence when under assault. This then is why he is detached and sits at home playing with car parts, but then he gets somewhat gets involved with the girl next door and her son. He seems to be eying romance and the domestic with longing, but he knows what he is. He is, after all, a getaway driver for unpleasant people. He knows: and so when he kisses her in the elevator, even though this seems a ridiculous thing to do when under threat in close confines, he does so because he knows that when he does indeed attack the hoodlum, any chance he has with her will be gone because there shall be no disguising that truth about him (and perhaps if she does accept what he is, perhaps she isn’t his idyll after all). And indeed, the head-stomping is horrifying, and it is not abbreviated; it is excessive in a way that goes beyond self-preservation. It is psychotic. And she stands there and watches and she sees what he is and what he is capable of. And for this reason, I came to change my mind and believe that the elevator scene was the pinnacle of the film, and that it did indeed work after all. We may revel in the driver’s ability to best the bad guys with violence that matches if not supersedes theirs, in the manner that we revel in power and revenge fantasies, but it is also psychotic and surely does not meet the criteria of heroism. It is, like much of Refn’s oeuvre, another portrait of an incredibly, horrifying violent man trying to hold things together. We see evidence of this from his first feature “Pusher” right through “Bronson” and “Valhalla Rising”. And he is very good at painting these portraits, however similar thematically, through varying shades of different genres. Here, the stripped down romantically inclines thriller gives his violent man tale a pretty and soft veneer with a shattering centre. Some may see the driver as Steve McQueen cool, but that surely is not the truth of it. (And all this and the accomplished retro-feel, one can only imagine what Refn might have done, or could still do with Brett Easton Ellis' "American Psycho".)

Refn sees “Drive” in terms of a fairy-tale, which implies that those metaphysical and symbolic gestures are actually treated in earnest. Refn directs both stylishly and bluntly so that the effect is disorienting, as if the sleek gloss of ’Eighties Hollywood never went out of fashion, but interrupted by the shock of recent extreme cinema. It is like Scorsese, Mann, Walter Hill, Gasper Noe, Takashi Miike are all being shaken in a cocktail glass of blood and grue. The characters are indeed mostly ciphers and that is mostly the point. Carey Mulligan, for example, is just a pretty porcelain face and little else, and perhaps her vapidity – unconvincing as she is as a single mother – is what attracts her to the driver. (And she, too, is a mostly wordess character flirting with violence, as her attraction for the driver and her just-out-of-jail husband hints; what does she see in them?). And “Drive” may well also feature “Ron Perlman, giving perhaps his first bad performance” [*A. Tracey] But its silliness is more to do with the fact that Refn’s film has everything to do with cinematic reality, gently nodding at archetypes so hard in order to make them totems and symbolic, not only clichés. It’s more in tune with the real world than Tarantino or your average Hollywood actioner, but only by a matter of degrees. It is the style, the mood, Ryan Gosling, the everso-slightly dreamy momentum and indulgences that make “Drive” transcend its pretensions and clichés. It is like a New Wave synthesiser being smashed up with a punk guitar. It’s a bloody marshmellow, a beguiling bone-based cake that allows a fan to give in to cinematic artifice and the pleasures of a typical genre piece told with just a touch of dazzle and insight. In that way, “Drive” is probably both less and more than it seems and as engrossing and dazzling piece of artifice as you are likely to see in the post-noir era.

Don't Be Afraid of the Dark

2011-10-16T11:21:00.006+01:00

DON’T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK

Troy Nixhey, 2010 (USA-Australia-Mexico)

Anyone troubled by thick shadows and impregnable darkness need not really be worried by “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark”. Troy Nixey’s adaptation of favoured 70’s TV movie horror of the same name offers up Movie Darkness, which means that we barely ever get real, pitch darkness. The darkness that is offered is often inconsistent; for example, the basement – surely meant to make the title really something to worry about – is brightly lit and the creatures are mostly glaringly visible in dull light; which also negates the whole they can’t stand the light clause. After a prologue featuring a crowd-pleasing teeth assault (the audience I saw this with were audibly delighted and troubled) the film skips through it’s clichés cheerfully enough without doing anything new or damaging: whispery voices; a bathroom assault; bad dialogue; something under the dining table at daddy’s big business meal; characterisation that never goes up a gear; no one believes the troubled child, and so on.

The girl – Sally (Bailee Maddison) – is the troubled and precocious mini-Goth soul of divorced parents; then mum sends her to stay with dad, multiplying her alienation and sense of rejection, which manifests in moroseness and tearful outbursts. Courtesy of the big name associated with this production – Guillermo el Toro had a hand in the screenplay and production – Dad (Guy Pearce) lives in a huge, gothic old house that he is restoring with his new interior designer girlfriend (Katie Holmes). We do not really get a grand tour of this remarkable building as the action is mostly confined to a handful of rooms, so our sense of its size is mostly limited to its impressive grounds and exterior shots. Nevertheless, within five minutes, the girl is finding the basement that no one else has noticed and hearing voices saying they want to play with her and that her parents do not love her. In truth, Sally seems a bit too smart and aware to fall for this ruse, but in no time she is heading into the cellar all alone and so on. The homunculi – who like to eat children’s teeth especially (a better use of the Tooth Fairy myth than “Darkness Falls” [2003]) – act increasingly aggressively, and for a moment they are mischievous and give the film its one truly gleefully macabre moment: they manipulate a toy teddy bear to make the girl think it is alive. But dad is too preoccupied with reviving his career to pay full attention to her monster tales. Meanwhile, potential step-mom is increasingly concerned at her boyfriend’s blinkered treatment of his daughter and starts to befriend Sally. A little feminist bonding gives the staid characterisation some lift and colour. Step-mom starts to investigate Sally’s story and luckily, inevitably, inexcusably, there is a Librarian of Exposition to put into place that this may all be the fault of ancient fairies, etc.

In the end, impressive set design only goes so far as compensation for a really tired narrative, and a constantly gliding and faux-showy camera cannot disguise that tiredness. Worst of all, the film is sloppy with details: does that pretty bedside map casting eerie horses on the wall play music all the time or just sometimes? There’s a monster arm lying on the floor… does no one notice? Or, as Unkle Lancifer says: “the film’s largest break from known reality involves not fairy monsters but a magical Polaroid camera that never runs out of film.” (*kindertrauma) Del Toro’s customary fairy tale trimmings are nice without really bringing more than nice décor and some colourful backstory, the kind that his Hellboy deals with before breakfast. As Lancifer wisely notes, “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark” would work better as a PG horror, and the teeth chiselling that starts it off seems more tacked on in order to bump up its superficial horror ratings credibility. Ultimately, the camera can’t stop gliding, there is little stillness or true darkness to truly unsettle and the most troubling and perhaps daring result of the film is that the stepmother is undeservedly sacrificed to sate these manifestations of the child’s latent fury and resentment at her situation. Shame the film is too shallow to make the most of this genuinely chilling subtext.

But it is true that the homunculi are spooky and steal the show.

KM 31: Kilómetro 31

2011-08-26T20:41:00.004+01:00

KM 31: Kilómetro 31

Rigoberto Castañeda, 2006, Mexico-Spain

This starts off decently enough, helped by a drained colour palate where everything is moody greys and blues and helped by a lot of black. Woman driving home through a deserted country road appears to hit a child, but the child isn’t dead… and then she is. Perhaps the Twin Sisters With Psychic Bond and Dark Past ought to be a clue that we might be in trouble, viewer, but it is only really when our troubled protagonist and her man run into The Old Lady of Exposition that it becomes clear that “KM 13” is a total mess of plot, has lost its sense of foreboding for increasingly cheaper shocks and effects.

Oh, and the old lady is a ghost, which insults so much and is so obvious that any viewer is likely to go from mild curiosity to openly snorting at the unravelling narrative and suspense, such as they were. Indicative of the overall sloppiness is how one moment they are running out to the haunted road, and the next they have to take cars and taxis. And the lighting becomes similarly arbitrary: the woodland is dark one moment and then impossibly lit by Kleig lights the next. And what is the point of having a sewer showdown if it’s lit to banish any hint of shadow? The showdown is moreorless the protagonist standing in the sewers staring at desperate special effects, the kind of ghostly visions that were the highlight of ropey old “Ghost Story” and a hundred derivatives, but are so rote and badly presented here that there is not even any room to enjoy cliché or take it as so-bad-it’s-good amusement.

BROTHERHOOD

2011-07-31T16:22:00.004+01:00

BROTHERHOOD

Taegukgi hwinalrimyeo

Je Gyu- Kang, 2004, South Korea

We start by literally digging up the history of the Korean war: an excavation of a battlefield is underway. Everything is as straightforward as can be; we know where we stand and the conventions are all in place (at the very lest, Spielberg’s war epics shall be good indications of what’s to come). Triggered by the excavation and the search for a battlefield survivor, a flashback returns us to 1950 at the outbreak of the Korean war. Grand period street scene recreations abound, against which our two protagonists, the brothers, dash around as the score flourishes. All very Segio Leone, very Bertolucci, etc.

“Brotherhood” is a struggle between the overwhelming achievement of its battle scenes and the overwhelming forces of its melodrama. The latter provides an almost perfunctory framework within which the former can operate. The melodrama of the tale of two brothers coerced into the Korean war runs along emotional and narratively contrived and predictable lines: it starts out all “Once Upon A Time in Korea” with the immense street scenes epic in detail and nostalgic in tone, for we join them on The Perfect Day Before Their Lives Changed Forever. We know that these opening scenes will come back as flashbacks later on in more fraught times. One brother – Jin-saeok Lee (Bin Won) - is an academic, and the other – Jin-tae Lee (Dong-gun Jang) - is a ‘rough’ streetwise shoe-seller. Later, there shall be a lot of sentiment over both symbolic pens and shoes. So rich is their environment and set design that the obviousness of what the narrative is doing and what is being set up is secondary. The broad strokes may make Je-Gyu’s film undemanding, but the details frequently keep it compelling: the maggots on casualty wounds; the starvation; the way the young men are duped into being drafted into the army; the confusion and in-fighting about who, exactly, is the enemy. Even better is the way Je-Gyu frequently shows how the epic qualities of war, with which we are all acquainted from cinema, is always reduced to hand-to-hand combat: the melees remind us that this is not only about a bunch of extras and dummies flying around in the distance to frightening and thrilling explosions, but also the messy, chaotic, free-for-all man-to-man combat that leaves life a second-to-second business. So visceral and intimate are these masses of fist-fights of the first battle scene – so brilliantly achieved – that by the end of the first hour it feels as if “Brotherhood” is already done, having fulfilled its quota.

But there is a further hour and a half to go. The rough brother is corrupted by war, by his own heroism, even as his pen-pushing sibling walks through unscathed much like an untouched virgin in a brothel. Je-Gyu appears to be trying for something mythical, totemic and/or archetypal in this tale of brotherly love driven apart by war, but all this seems to mean is that the melodrama increases without ever straining convention or anything nuanced. We also get many more battle scenes, and these often take the breath away. In their insistence and persistence that epic battles are always ultimately about a mass of men pounding and stabbing away at one other in trenches - thrashing around on top of each other in total desperate and murderous mayhem with very little rhyme or reason other than to stay alive - the battle scenes are as consummate condemnation of war as any you are likely to see. Jin-tae is a virtual superman in his heroism, seeming impervious to hails of bullet at times, and yet Je-Gyu never wallows in the dubious victories of war. The soldiers and streets may celebrate, but after the first victory party, these celebrations seem to become hollow and tired and by rote. Their propagandist nature rises to the surface with repetition. But “Brotherhood” has its own agenda of sentiment and by the final battle this has drowned those smarter details and, like so many war films, reduces the huge horror to a [sibling] love story, to the detriment of insight.

“Brotherhood” probably isn’t much of a digging up of Korea’s history of conflict - I certainly learnt nothing specific about its causes and complexities, although mass confusion at gound-level seems a reasonable estimate of life during wartime - and there is certainly merit in dragging it to the heel of human tragedy, to the individuals and families torn apart. But arguably a clear and less fevered eye is more instructive and so “Brotherhood” feels classic only in the way that classics may have once relied too much upon sentiment and a grand scale to avoid politics and insights (for example: Eastwood’s “Letters From Iwo Jima” provides a similar but cooler and more incisive comparison; “Brotherhood” is more like “Flags of Our Fathers” in its reliance upon nostalgia and over-cooked pathos). But there is a lot of terrible truth in those numerous battle scenes and it is those that will leave the viewer breathless, shaken and hugely impressed. The actual tale of brotherhood evaporates in a explosion of melodramatic cliché.

13 ASSASSINS

2011-07-31T15:54:00.014+01:00

13 ASSASSINS - Jûsan-nin no shikaku

Takashi Miike, Japan-UK, 2010

I know that for a Western audience it is ordinarily “Audition” or “Ichi the Killer” that acts as their introduction to Takashi Miike, but for me it was “Visitor Q”. It was “Visitor Q” that truly told me that Miike was a master of not only shock cinema, but cinema and genre overall. What an induction. The most incredible social satire, a real funny and unapologetic shocker. Miike famously has an incredible output. 50 films to date and counting or something. He has tried everything. And he can do anything. Working your way through his back catalogue will take you from the sublime, the manic, the carefully crafted to the more workmanlike. But even at his most prosaic – “One Missed Call” and “Bodyguard Kiba” – there is always evidence of Miike’s barely tethered inventiveness, always at least one remarkable moment. If I say he is a master of genre, then you may pick any genre that you favour and he has set a precedent in it. He understands genre. His is an incredibly gonzo imagination but he also possesses great discipline and exceptional artistry.

Take for example Miike’s adaptation of Eiichi Kudo’s “The Thirteen Assassins”, the 1963 shogun film. Miike’s “13 Assassins” starts with a episode of seppuku which is no less gruelling for the act itself taking place offscreen: Miike trusts that all we need to see is the actor’s tortured face; and yes it is enough. But this is also not to say that Miike will hold back from shock and explicitness. Soon, we gaze upon a traumatised woman whose limbs have been cut off by the insane Shogun lord. Next, we shall see this lord using a family as target practice. Later, the blood will flow. And how. There is a steady and pensive nature to the first half of “13 Warriors”, in which the chilling atrocities carried out by the Shogun lord - Lord Naritsugu (Gorô Inagaki) - have time to ferment. This is a villain of incredible vintage. His cruelty is boundless and moored to his philosophy that to be a Shogun is to be a God, that cruelty is the natural right and extension of the absolute power he possesses. It is a power buffered by the way of the samurai who do his bidding, who must die for him and never question why. “13 Assassins” has much to say about the atrocities allowed by rampant feudalism and blind obedience. The themes of the film are timeless just as the film feels timeless: it already feels like a classic.
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The inspirations and references are easy to conjure – Kurosawa, etc – but, again, Miike’s mastery of genre is unsurpassed and all his own. We have 13 assassins even before the wealth of side characters that populate all the political intrigue; but Miike knows that we know the nature of this film, that we know our Kurosawa and Leone and Ford and all those other classics. He knows that he can sketch the assassins with hints of stock types and allow fine actors to bring them to life and that shall be enough for the audience to keep track. There is no need for flashbacks and great back-stories, although we get a little of that also. The beginning is the slow burn: our villain is vile, our assassins assembled, our blood chilled and the atmosphere thick with pending confrontation. Miike allows the superficially slow pace (a repeat viewing will reveal that, in actually, it is not so slow and that narrative is delivered in a number of swift set-pieces with often underplayed and straightforward drama) and the dour, low naturalistic lighting to cast a doom-laden, almost uncanny atmosphere, and expectation for the confrontation builds on and on.

The way of the samurai is dying away and, most of all, these samurai want a last chance to use their skills and die by the way of the sword, as they wish. There is a lot about honour and choice in “13 Assassins” too. Even for the youngest member who merely wants to get the chance to try out his skills and die like his heroes. There are a handful of stand-offs to whet the appetite and some gorgeous photography to keep us gripped as expectation mounts further.

And then … and then Miike offers us something sublime. A battle that takes half of the film. A battle in which he unleashes all the repressed violence that has been building up. A battle that relishes the old fashioned cinematic joy of a handful of heroic types up against impossible odds (and it feels joyously far from the macho-heroics of American action cinema). A battle that is built not from CGI (although probably that too), but collapsing sets, giant gates, hundreds of extras, lashings of blood and, exhilaratingly, burning and rampaging bulls. It is one of the greatest battle scenes ever filmed. If it sometimes falls into the modern trap of action conveyed by a shaking camera and too many cuts, threatening incomprehensibility at times, it also follows the battle over rooftops and through streets, alleys and buildings and with the thirteen assassins without ever truly losing us. It is quite remarkable and thrilling. Also remarkable is that throughout this cinematic exhilaration, Miike never loses the sense of doom, of the themes already established, of existential musing on what it means to die for something - blindly or knowlingly - of choosing to challenge the wrong of the established order and hierarchy.
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I never thought I would see a new Miike film at the cinema (he makes so many and they generally bypass the London big screen), but I did and I was reminded why he is one of my favourite directors. I knew, when the battle scene began, that I was in the midst of watching a masterpiece. Having deliberately avoiding reading anything about it, the battle scene surprised and dazzled me. But all the time, I knew that the whole of the film was so much more. An instant classic. It straddles everything that has been celebrated about classic cinema with all the artistry and tricks of modern cinema, much like “There Will Be Blood” and “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward John Ford”. The quiet of the aftermath and the slightly sly humour and final sentiment of the closing exchange between survivors continues to elevate the film to the very end. The bloodletting and the samurai code is finally dismissed and mocked even as the honour and sacrifice of our eponymous heroes is respected and makes the viewer wonder what it is to die for duty. Or, as Nick Schager summarises, “Miike isn't interested in shades of gray, but rather in celebrating the dignity of forfeiting one's comfort and livelihood (if not life itself) for a worthy cause.”

“13 Assassins” is delirious, mad, elegant, thoughtful, cathartic, dazzling in scope, funny, gritty and brutal. It feels both like art and pure cinema in that is luxuriates in spectacle, storytelling and man’s confrontations with himself and others, and his place in the universe and the natural world. Another Miike masterpiece.

Introducing my novel: "Blazer Fables"

2011-06-23T23:08:00.013+01:00

Here, then, is my first completed novel, self-published and all that. "Blazer Fables". It's a boarding school story interested in locating those moments that define character during adolescence. The characters are mostly centred in a single dorm and it is their stories that are followed. Hope, despair, boredom, comic books, petty squabbles, grand friendships, great artistic ventures, continental trips, fighting, foolishness, English lessons and music all feature. .

Perhaps you might like to try it out?

The novel is based upon a real location, but it's all fiction. I painted the cover, took the back cover photograph and chose the font. When I was a kid, I loved to make, draw, write and design my own comics and books. Horror anthologies, puzzle books (wordsearches, etc), superhero comics, James Bond parodies and "Clash of the Titans" rip-offs. I tried them all. This then is just doing the same thing on a more costly scale. There are meant to be, in fact, two more volumes to "Blazer Fables"... but who knows if that shall ever happen?

Mostly, it is fun to have completed something like this and to have it printed and tangible, weighty in my hands. It has been ten years in the writing, due to starting it with feverish ambition, then sabotaged by dying computers and abandoned for over half a decade as I tried other things. But I came back to it last year, seduced by the prospect of publishing all by myself, and therefore finished it. Blessed be the internets for offering vanity publishing. If you are to write into a void, it's probably more satisfying to throw an actual physical entity into it.

INSIDIOUS

2011-05-02T17:35:00.011+01:00

James Wan,
2010, US

“Insidious” Director James Wan is, of course, infamous for being behind the original “Saw” and “Paranormal Activity”. This is branded all over the promotion, naturally, and so let us look at his latest offering to see if there is more franchise-making potential in him.

Our troubled middle-class family, the Lamberts, can’t manage a piece of original or distinct dialogue between them. The parents go to bed and talk like teenagers just into the “serious” stage of dating rather than grown adults with three kids to their name. But this is the least of the parents’ problems. There’s a baby to provide baby-monitor frights and a second child who gets only to be scared of his older brother before disappearing from the scenario. The older brother, Dalton (Ty Simpkins), is the real problem. Don't be fooled by the promotional posters that seem to cast him as a Devil Child. No: on one spooksome excursion into the attic, he bumps his head and soon afterwards falls into a coma. Around this time, events happen that seem to indicate the house is haunted. There is a baby monitor present, so you know how that goes (strange vocal sounds resembling Mike Patton improvising comes through the tinny speaker) and this is where “Insidious” provides its best stretch.

Although the film is not without atmosphere in the early stages, events clip along so quickly that I occasionally wasn’t aware the scene had changed or that, suddenly, they were unpacking, not still packing up to move… the family had already done so. Indeed, the speed and substance is little more than that of the short horror tales in, say, comics like “House of Mystery”, and as ultimately impatient and obvious as the worst of “Goosebumps”. What “Insidious” does have is a handful of nicely staged early scares and a bunch of funhouse ride jumps at the end. This appears to be what everyone is raving about. In fact, the final act is so stuffed full of desperate attempts to make the audience jump that it strangles the film whilst it is still flailing about. But let’s step back a bit because, before that, with the baby monitor scare, the film manages to truly tap into the scary.

Forgoing most of the flavourless dialogue and characters for a while, Wan concentrates on the frights, and some of them are great. The figure by the cot; the figure pacing up and down outside the window and, perhaps best of all, the dark shadow inside the house dancing around to an old tune as Renai Lambert (Rose Byrne) looks in from a sunny exterior. At one point, the haunting not only has spectres in the house, but is also triggering the house alarms and opening front doors, tapping simultaneously into as many fears of home invasion as possible. Inevitably, Wan overdoes each set-up, forgoing the creeps for cheap jumps. There is a nice use of timing when the “Jump Blare” from the soundtrack happens a moment after the figure at the cot, but otherwise the escalations and cues are mostly obvious. Although there is a great chill when the figure pacing outside the window is suddenly pacing inside, it’s followed by the cheap jump of the figure making a grab for our token mother. Similarly, the dancing shadow in the house during the daytime gives way to a less poetic and eerie chase-the-ghost through the rooms. The creepy vision of the shadowy, inhuman arm standing by the bed of the comatose boy gives way to it tritely pointing at the kid. Nevertheless, this is the most successful sequence of scares, during which we discover that it is not the house that is haunted, but Dalton himself.

Discovering their first move has landed them in the world of “Poltergeist” and Asian horror ghost scares, the Lamberts simply get up and move. This is refreshing: how many times have we wondered why families stay in places that are terrorising them? Because it is Dalton that is haunted, the film is free to let them do what we all would think we would do: get out. Of course, the Lamberts actually have the finances, apparently, to do such a thing. One minute they are there, and the next they have moved with the snap of the fingers. Not bad for a teacher and, seemingly, a composer of songs for a living. Haunted houses ought to be tied in to all kinds of financial concerns and woes, but this is rarely exploited to the best in cinematic hauntings. In the new house, Renai Lambert continues to experience terrifying supernatural shocks. And then the film takes a total nosedive with the arrival of the ghost hunters.

First, the two slightly bickering nerds turn up for comic relief. Then, their boss the old lady medium Elise Rainier (Lin Shaye) turns up and her terrible mumbo-jumbo and exposition about astral projection, malevolent entities and “The Further” throws the film way out from the sequence of enjoyable and genuine chills. Her horribly trite assumptions and supernatural medium abilities are barely challenged: Josh Lambert (Patrick Wilson) quite sensible throws her out at first but then, seeing some of his kid’s drawings on the wall, which he surely would have seen any number of times before, he suddenly realises that he is all wrong and Elise the medium is all right.

The film at this point has given over to its inane and laughable dialogue and explanations and imagines its haunts as spooks from a rock videos extras department: grinning, pasty-faced, haggard, whistling, wearing wedding dresses, you know the drill. Worst, “Insidious” falls ultimately into relying on devil imagery and by that time there is no sense that Wan and writer Leigh Whannel have any investment in their story or family at all: it’s just a tired and worn funhouse ride. I have overheard comparisons with “Drag Me To Hell”, but “Drag Me To Hell” works on a number of different levels, it is invested in its characters and in what horror means and can represent. Also, there is a gonzo sensibility to Raimi’s funhouse style that sets the precedent that very few seem able to follow without relying upon the same old, tired jump scares and wafer-thin characterisation. Wan even throws in a gas-mask contraption for the séance sequence because, well, gas-masks are scary, right? And do watch out for the little Jigsaw (from “saw”) doodle on the blackboard.

Towards the end, during the screening I attended (where people jumped like crazy at some places and openly laughed at ‘The Further’ in others), I leaned to my friend and joked that I predicted an “Astral smackdown” between astral projections. I was right. The film relies upon that American-Hollywood belief that simply shouting at the enemy/ghosts and being self-assertive can solve everything, and if you can have a punch-up, that's affirmative too. Where modern filmmakers seem to rely so much on editing learnt from advertising and music videos, where they seem to suffer from a crippling anxiety that the audience has no attention span, horror films with genuine pacing and build-up are being asphyxiated in the mainstream. Especially the modern mainstream ghost film, which relies so very much upon atmospherics and dread. So worried about not deviating from the standard Christian approach to American horror are such films that they throw in redundant devil imagery because, ~ as with “Insidious” ~ with no real characters, dialogue or atmosphere to fall back on, they have nowhere else to go. There is a last-minute attempt at a twist of sorts, but even that ends up a little as a dead end: what does it mean? What is the logical continuation of the final revelation? A family massacre? A difficult divorce?

Wan’s film insults on so many levels. You will take away a handful of good scares and a couple of jumps, but it is mostly derivative and cliché and ultimately condescending and insulting to its audience in those ways. This is horror for those that don’t necessarily like horror and think that all that horror is is “being scary” and jumping out of your seat. A ghost story as MTV video. And I would not count out a sequel.

BOOK OF BUZZ: "Bug Room"

2011-04-13T22:41:00.012+01:00

Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce a band that I am in...

bug room by Book of Buzz

BUG ROOM

Tenderness. Tenderness is frozen. The Wilderness is calling. Emptiness is the four walls I’ve been given. A jar of bugs. A slow death on a sill.

Nothing to prove.

Nothing to hide.

You wouldn’t want me.

You wouldn’t have me anyway.

Like a prom king that grew up wrong and took it out on his bride.

Sympathy and forgiveness are for taking. A last note: badly spelt; asking. A lack of manners: challenge all-comers! A sleeplessness full of blood-dogs and dumbness.

Tenderness… The Wilderness… Emptiness… a jar of bugs… A slow death on a sill…

Nothing to prove.

Nothing to hide.

You wouldn’t want me.

You wouldn’t have me anyway.

Like a prom king that grew up wrong and took it out on his bride.

____________________________

“Bug Room” written by Book of Buzz

The Man With The 2Quid Moustache: buggy bass, guitar & keyboards. - Buck Theorem: words&vocals - Javier Rodriguez Rodriguez Rodriguez: drumkit bug

recorded by Dan Marshall

Mixed by Kramer (!)

Book of Buzz tunes.

Book of Buzz on facebook .

"The Electric Stuff of Love" by the man with the 2quid moustache

"Sucker Punch"

2011-04-11T23:03:00.009+01:00

Zack Snyder, 2011, USA

“Sucker Punch” is a mess. Incredibly so. If nothing else, Snyder has given a clue as to what the fantasies might look like of an adolescent boy getting his first awkward crush over a female character from a games console adventure. On the other hand, the mash-up anything-goes-high-fantasy-over-plotted-and-under-developed and adventures-within-adventures set-up also resembles many comic strips from “Heavy Metal” magazine and many Manga titles. It’s just... a mess.

By the miracle of CGI and other modern special effects, Snyder can do anything, but that only means he has no control. More for the mix: steampunk, “American McGee’s Alice”, Ray Harryhausen giant monsters, post-“X-men” moody and soapy superhero comics, bad fem-rock videos. When tied to a solid and fascinating story such as “Watchmen”, Snyder’s boundless/undisciplined imagination sometimes worked wonders in bringing that seminal graphic novel to life. When limited to a realistic world and forced to abide by certain horror conventions, Snyder produced a number of outstanding scenes in his remake of “Dawn of the Dead” (the opening remains one of the best introductory sequences ever). “300” showed just how ridiculous and terrible Snyder can be when the script does not focus him: at his worst, he comes across as oblivious to the actual meaning and intent of the material at hand. But “300” is, if nothing else, one big joke of absurdism and there is a tongue in a cheek somewhere, surely. When, in “Watchmen”, he used “Hallelujah” for a sex scene, it was hilariously audacious. “Sucker Punch” has none of this knowingness. It has no control at all.

Here is a director that has used music and genre mash-ups to considerable effect previously, and yet here hits all the wrong notes. In “Dawn of the Dead” he bonded Johnny Cash with the zombie genre, and in “Watchmen”, the superhero genre with Nina Simone, all to wonderful effect. With “Sucker Punch” there is some Tarantino effect where you feel that he has written down the play-list for the soundtrack before getting the film together. He doesn’t go as far as to ‘sample/steal’ from other film soundtracks, but what we do have is a relentless catalogue of so-so rock cover-versions. The songs are often so obvious and puerile in their association to the plot that you wonder if there will be a song about walking up stairs when someone walks up stairs. “Army of Me” when Baby Doll first shows her combat skills; “Where is My Mind?” to signify lobotomised and fantasy-insanity; “Search and Destroy” for… you get the idea. We know we are in trouble from the outset: before we have even settled, we have an extended pre-credits music-video for a cover version of “Sweet Dreams (are made of this)”, which is apparently the go-to song for girls being abused by their step-daddies once their mother dies. In trying to stop leery step-dad from abusing her sister, Baby Doll (Emily Browning) accidentally shoots her sister (although the scene is muddled and so this was not particularly clear to me at first, or to the people I went to see the film with). It is somehow indicative of the bewildered and shallow psychology of “Sucker Punch” that it has no understanding of the ambiguities of the lyric of “Sweet Dreams”, that they imply a little give-and-take which, if applied to the situation of these “Sucker Punch” sisters, could imply they were as much to blame as the step-dad. Well, they do dress sweetly and move around in pretty slo-mo. Overall, “Sucker Punch” goes on to look like feature-length music video tie-in for a dodgy cover versions album. There is no interesting friction in the mash-ups of inappropriate songs married to various scenes. Song choices: 1 point (the originals are mostly great). Cover Versions: 1 (they probably aren't all bad when taken out of the film). Song use: minus 3 points.

And so Baby Doll is thrown into a sanatorium by her step-dad and left at the mercy of the corrupt orderlies. At the point of being lobotomised, reality flips and we are in a club/brothel full of hot girly-girls and frequented by putrid males. Baby Doll has retreated into an alternate reality where the club is run by a sub-Pacino scene-chewer called Blue (Oscar Isaac), and where she proves not only to be the best dancer ever, but also the one to encourage a handful of other captive girls to try to escape. As ever, this fantasy runs on the perpetual “chosen one” motif. However, there is another collapsing of reality, for when Baby Doll dances, she zones out and we are given self-contained action sequences in different scenarios/levels. These are the best moments of the film, for they hold the crop of beautiful images and offer up a selection of game-inspired but irresistible creatures: clockwork nazis, giant samurais with chain-guns; dragons; bi-planes; robot-battle-suits; silver attack robots – all familiar from sources such as “Lord of the Rings”, “Killzone”, “Dragonslayer” and so on and so on. For my money, the giant samurai fight is the best of the lot, the clockwork nazis the creepiest, the dragon the prettiest. But then I am a sucker for a good dragon. (The dragon sequence offers perhaps the most original and striking visual: when it bites off the tail of the fleeing airplane, we get to see it chomp down from inside the plane.) The fight editing is thrilling and unintelligible in equal measure, but at least in these sequences Snyder is not tied down to story and he offers some spectacular artificial imagery.

Rarely has a film gotten such a kick from watching girls getting kicked around and then kicking-ass. On the one side, this feels like more titillation for the guys, on the other the girls’ involuntary squeals and grunts of pain and panic seems to reveal how artificial macho-centric and unrealistic films are when they don’t show the men during battle doing the same (yes, I know: a real man doesn’t squeal in pain, etc.). The girls scream and grunt here, and then they wipe out the opposition. But “Sucker Punch” is so thoroughly divorced from reality and the action sequences so grounded in game-console language that no point is proven about gendered action fiction and only the titillation remains. We are meant perhaps to see this is a tale of oppressed and abused girls discovering feminine fight-back power, and Snyder has said he sees it as such, but they are dressed for the male gaze and the male gaze runs supreme here: in “300” this male gaze, fascinated with physique and muscles, flesh and action-poses, created infamously homoerotic vistas; in “Sucker Punch” it simply feels like pandering to a teen fanboy’s soft core dreams. When the girls are hurt and abused, tears streaming down faces and so on, it feels like more titillation: look how pretty the girls hurt. Emily Brown as Baby Doll, evidently cast for her big Manga-eyes and Bambi-in-headlights looks, is barely human at all, so porcelain is her skin, so eternally and simultaneously injured and vacuous are her looks. Not that the other girls fare any better, but Baby Doll is left troublingly not so much between Virgin/Whore but more Kewpie Doll/Whore, an empty vessel and lacuna upon which stuttering male fantasies can have it all. She is slave to a brothel; she can dance like a stripper (the fact that we do not see her dance feels analogous to the fact that we cannot see her in the bedroom with clients ~ this is pretty sordid stuff for a PG-13); she can fight back too and look hot doing so. Compare with Hit-Girl from “Kick Ass”: Snyders harem of girl-power folds into ridiculousness by comparison. Which girl audience would take Baby Doll, Sweet Pea, Blondie, Rocket and Amber as their fantasy icons when you have Hit-Girl to hand? (And no, I don't consider The Spice Girls to have been a genuine historical source of "girl-power" either.)

And finally there shall be the old martyred heroine to top off the cheap dramatics and clichés. Well, not totally: the end credits, appallingly, give a last minute musical number (of “Love is the Drug”, no less). Confused on all frequencies and misfiring on several, “Sucker Punch” has only the visuals of the fantasy sequences to recommend it, and even then they shall remind you of gameplaying and other films. Come the third or fourth, even these sequences become tedious. “Sucker Punch” is only going to feed Snyder’s detractors endlessly and, after “Watchmen’s” successes (and time shall surely prove it a success in the main part), “Sucker Punch” is a terrible comedown. Snyder is a visualiser who apparently needs a strong script to rein him in, but right now his failings as a mature artist probably fits just right for Hollywood’s juvenilia. Who knows, since he has proven hit-and-miss and thoroughly erratic, his next film might be his best? But they probably shouldn’t let him write it.

The Burning (...and sexual tensions)

2011-04-07T22:56:00.010+01:00

THE BURNING

Tony Maylam, USA, 1981

For a certain generation, films such as “A Nightmare on Elm Street”, “The Evil Dead” and “The Burning” took on mythical status. There was I, at school, getting the low-down on how terrifying these films were from my far cooler pal, a guy who was tall for his age and dressed like a teddy-boy (making him quite the off-beat pal as this was the Eighties, remember) and seemed to have no trouble getting into or hold of 18 rated films. So it was that I first heard of “The Burning”, undoubtedly as we walked to school one morning. He filled me in on the slim storyline and, presumably, the nastier details. The concept of the rampaging burnt-up man certainly lodged in my brain. As this was one of the banned “video nasties”, I do wonder in retrospect how he got to see it. But only this much later in life have I gotten around to watching it myself, during which time I have seen a bundle of other films that have likely given me a near-to-perfect idea of what to expect.

As one of those horrors with a troubled history with the censors, “The Burning” has, if anything, probably increased in its notoriety. Some of this is down to nostalgia: it is indeed of its time and one of those films which contemporary slashers refer back to and copy. “The Burning” itself was already derivative of “Friday the 13^th”, which was already derivative of “Halloween”. But there is a straightforward quality to these ‘80s American slashers, an almost low-budget earnestness, that has given way to irony and homage decades later. “The Burning” is not devoid of satirical airs and it does possess a couple of iconic qualities and one seminal scene of carnage. It has the iconic “Cropsy” as its killer: a creepy summercamp janitor and the victim of a teenage prank that goes wrong, leaving him flailing around on fire and a hideously disfigured burns victim, courtesy of make-up celebrity Tom Savini. And then its true iconic image is the image of the silhouetted Cropsy holding up the open garden sheers, ready to bring them down on whatever victim lay beneath.

As the modern viewer might expect, there is a lot of tying-in with sex, death and mutilation. As Aurum notes,

"the film is a particularly clear example of the Puritanism of this particular subgenre, since virtually all killings follow various scenes of sex play, and thus can be all to easily read as ‘dire warnings’ or ‘punishments justly deserved'. [1]"

Indeed, Cropsy tends to go manic after foreplay or teenage sex. His first kill is a prostitute who rejects him once she lays eyes on his barely human burned visage (Savini himself says that it is not a realistic portrayal of a burns victim; it is rather a stretched, silly-putty like hall-of-mirrors distortion. Cropsy is effectively rendered impotent, and in rage he murders her with a protracted scissor-slaying. It is as if the worst thing, the very thing that turns him insane with random fury, is not so much his disfigurement but that he is left without male potency, that he is sexless.

Next stop: the summer camp, where there is a whole lot of typical machismo, posturing and preening. The girls seem to giggle about sex and flirt in equal measure: perhaps they are meant to be, if you will, reproachable teasers (as Aurum says) but there is a slightly softer and greyer arena of interactions going on; not necessarily due to any superior characterisation and writing, but just a little ambiguity and complexity to the characters work wonders. For example, the resident bully is himself consistently mocked and rejected and, although arguably close to one, he is not the date-rapist that many of the other guys seem so uniformly close to being. He alone is shown trying to please his girl and appreciate her. When their sex falls short, he simply apologises and doesn’t resort to aggressive insistence on his virility. He’s not a soft romantic but there is the impression that he might have range to mature. By contrast, the other "funny guys" all seem much closer to genuine date-rapists, sly coercers and Nice Guys. The tension around sex and youthful exploration is probably expressed at its most obvious and sympathetic where one girl is simultaneously curious, charmed and afraid of the boy trying to romance her. But it is tough luck because any step towards sex receives a pair of garden sheers. “The Burning” is one of those films that simultaneously formed and adhered to the slasher conventions and provided the material for endless parodies.

But it is limited to see Cropsy as only a puritanical punisher. He serves as more than just a warning and retribution, for he is also the manifestation of the girls’ fear of painful penetration, of their anxieties about rape and the loss of virginity. In one example, there is a close-up of the girl trying to hold the open sheers blades at bay as Cropsy forces in on her, which is unsettling and clear in its symbolism. Cropsy is the wild, roaming, ugly personification of all the rape tendencies that seem to underlay most of the male student’s interactions with the girls. One might even find a “dire warning” in the fact that “Woodstock”, the character referred to most as a masturbator, has his fingers chopped off. And then there is the backstory of Cropsy: in the fireside version, he was a disliked janitor who followed around a boy with his garden sheers constantly in hand.

Ah, yes, then we get to the meat of it: the raft scene. This is the scene that defines “The Burning”. It is here that the garden sheers are most used and it is the garden sheers that got the film added to the BBFC “video nasties” list during the 1980s. What the BBFC doesn’t tell you is that many of those “video nasties” were also full-on black comedies. “The Burning” is full of humour: black, intentional and unintentional. The summercamp scenario allows the shock-horror gags of Tom Savini’s gory effects work to move through teen comedy conventions. Funnier but less unique than “Sleepaway Camp”, “The Burning” is far more humane and proficient than the “Friday the 13^th” series (it seems to have more interest in its characters as actual people). Conversely, Savini doesn’t appear to have much time for the “Friday the 13^th” sequels and “The Burning” is certainly better conceived, but it is still b-grade stuff and its reputation rests mostly on those garden sheer killings which are mostly bundled all into the raft massacre. One can laugh at the idea that Cropsy ~ whose actual size seems to vary from this moment to that, although the intension is surely that he is a big, big guy ~ would lay down in a floating canoe with his sheers, just waiting and hoping that a raft topped with teenagers would bump into him. But the killing are indeed savage, sharply edited and graphically sprayed across the screen. If slasher films rest their worth mostly upon the killings, “The Burning” doesn’t have the bodycount of Jason Vorhees, but the raft slaughter is quite unforgettably vicious. It is true that slasher films seem to represent the meanest self-loathing of young horror fanatics for their own generation, portraying them often as selfish, disdainful and disposable. But those on the raft seem, of all the film’s victims, to be the most sympathetic and the least deserving. That, perhaps, is the greatest perversion. [2]

Another subplot provides Cropsy with another reading. There is a close alignment between Cropsy and resident nerd Alfred (Brian Backer) from the moment of the fireside horror-story, which is, of course, the tale of Cropsy. Alfred is apparently bullied and feels friendless, an outsider and alienated. The truth of it is that his dorm colleagues all incorporate and defend him from the main source of trouble, Glazer the bully. Perhaps Alfred’s true source of alienation and sense of inadequacy lays elsewhere. Alfred’s confused association with status, sex and scares is clear from his early attempt to scare a girl in the showers in some muddled plan to scare her, see her, to woo her, and to impress and emulate his peers. All his furious, unresolved and latent desires to resolve his sexuality and punish his perceived persecutors ~ or at least to visit a jealous vengeance upon those that are ostensibly "normal" in a way that he feels he is not ~ all this is manifest in Cropsy too. Cropsy is like Alfred’s retaliation unleashed and uncontrollable. Note how Cropsy incapacitates Alfred rather than kill him off quickly like everyone else (and if we wanted to stretch: is Alfred left-handed? Because if he is, is that his masturbating arm pinned to the wall?). But there is something else that may be at play here, for is it really the girls that makes Alfred feel inadequate? Is it that Alfred may well have a latent crush on the moderately sympathetic camp leader, or even Glazer himself? But let’s forget Glazer because he goes having sex with one of the hot girls and has "dead man" plastered all over him. Cropsy disposes of all the competition and leaves only the tale of the Alfred being saved by the camp counsellor and then Alfred saving the counsellor in return. (In a rarity for slasher plotting, Todd the councellor finds Alfred due to the latter’s screams and howls of horror; no suffering in manly silence for this victim.) Many read slashers as simply misogynist, but in truth they also contain endless male insecurities and desires to protect friends, families, lovers and crushes. Not so much a coming-out pic, then, but lots of repressed sexual rage which Cropsy happily acts out and then goes on to provide a romantic ending of sorts.

“The Burning” is entertaining and undemanding, but it snaps along brusquely, has better than average acting and atmosphere and is no-nonsense slasher fare. It is probably exactly the kind of item that horror’s detractors would wave around as exhibit #151 in the prosecution’s case. It is also exactly the kind of disposable and nasty fun that horror fans run to for undemanding entertainment.

[1] The Aurum Film Encyclopedia of Horror, editor Phil Hardy, (Aurum Press, 1993, London), page 346

[2] This perversity feels like something that Rob Zombie was trying to get to with many of his female victims in his version of “Halloween”)

The Second Jungle Book

2011-02-06T20:36:00.008Z

“THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK”

By Rudyard Kipling, 1902

Much of the superficial reputation of Killing’s “The Jungle Books” is surely down to the Disney adaptation, but Disney could not be further from the source material. The books carry the taste of genuine fables, the kind that came from the fireside tradition and bedtime stories. Firstly, they are not all based around Mowgli; secondly, Mowgli himself is not the cutesy Disney imp one might expect to meet; he is proud and defiant, a killer of enemies and as philosophical as any other of the jungle animals. And these books, like so many true classics ostensibly considered children’s books, are not childish. Killing’s “Just So Stories” may feel to be and are directed at the young reader/listener, but “The Jungle Books” are denser, less whimsical and more fascinating and complete.

Kipling does not routinely rely upon action to guide his story, but rather rumination on nature, man and violence as spoken through the man-cub and the jungle animals. Many of the stories that comprise the Jungle Books are conversation pieces: animals and characters sitting around negotiating, discussing, telling stories. “The Undertakers”, for example, is founded on a conversation between a pelican, a crocodile and a wolf, talking about eating and hunting: what emerges is a stark and unsentimental contemplation on the food chain. Although “Letting in the Jungle” seems as if it will build up to a chase narrative - wherein Mowgli will help the white couple that adopted him in earlier stories to escape from a town that believes Mowgli to be a werewolf of sorts, and therefore making the couple witches by association - Kipling rather allows conversations to mark the story and all the action to be told seemingly in that retrospective manner of the storyteller. Kipling is a natural storyteller whose prose and dialogue all serve vividly to depict events and conflict and contemplation.

Accusations of colonialist mentality and racism have long dogged Kipling’s reputation, and perhaps mostly due to “The White Man’s Burden”. However, The Jungle Books and Kim all exhibit a far more interesting and nuanced depiction of race relations: the eponymous hero of his novel “Kim” is a white boy, but Kim is culturally and psychologically an Indian native. Likewise, Mowgli is of man, and yet is fluent in jungle (animal) talk and finds no place with society other than the jungle animals. Both boys are hybrids of culture and identity and both straddle the divide with great confidence and pride. Kipling was himself much like Kim in that he grew up in India before being brought to England for an education, and the friction and fascination of holding a dual identity is strong throughout these texts. It even extends to the tale of “The Miracle of Purun Bhagat” wherein Purun Bhagat flows across the caste system from being prime minister to pauper to holy man across his lifetime.

Also notable is the portrayal of the animal kingdom as one big jungle democracy: “How Fear Came” has the animals congregate to discuss the upholding of their laws and hierarchy, for the sake of all-round harmony; and “The Law of the Jungle” details some of these in verse form. The latter also details the differences between each class and nature animals. The impression is of an analogy for international entities such as The United Nations, of diplomatic negotiations and respect for various and differing cultures and identities committing to the good of all. Many of Kipling’s protagonists are multicultural and swap castes and class comfortably. This is surely where Kipling’s true sentiment and vision lay, for his text repeatedly and lovingly investigate such transient identities. It is perhaps then inevitable that Kipling himself such a contrary character: as Peter Levi says in his introduction to “Just So Stories”: “I like his criticism of England, which was ceaseless, though I have also been told that he wrote the radio speeches of King George V.”*

His tales attack the artifice of the class system and respecting the many ways people live, and how identity is fluid depending upon environment. “Stalky and Co.” satirising and criticises the artifice of English boarding school educations, its chief success being the story “The ---” which condemns the educating of young men into soldiers. In The Jungle Books, it is true that man is the greatest threat to the jungle kingdom, but Kipling also vilifies unnecessary aggression (the animals the break the jungle laws) and deceit; for example, it is the fact that in “The King Ankus” the White Cobra lies to lure Mowgli into his den, and it is a jewel-studded sacrificial knife that represents all the murderous greed of mankind. The following two stories in “The Second Jungle Book”, however, do feature action sequences that put the reader into the thick of it.

Kipling’s fascination with cultures is absorbing. “Quiquern” details the lifestyle of an Inuit boy and his dogs in a thorough, straightforward style, and with respect to the merciless nature of the elements that feels similar to Jack London’s “The Call of the Wild” and “White Fang”: in this story, the dogs do not talk. London alternates from such realism-based tales to the fables of Mowgli and his anthropomorphic jungle folk with ease. They may differ and vary, but their interest in society and different races/classes/species and the outsider characters that move through them unites the two parallel veins of storytelling. It is also this interest that keeps the talking animal strain of tales from the more fantastical flourishes of the fairy-tale: they remain fables. Indeed, the image of the eight-legged and two headed monster wolf has a nice explanation.

With “Red Dog”, Mowgli’s story starts to winding down and the wolf pack that brought him up is coming to an end. They go out in a blaze of glory, seeing off a brutal pack of invading dholes. Mowgli’s Jungle, it seems, is not to be overrun and plundered by violent intruders who think it is theirs for the taking. The wisdom of the elders and the defiance of the young are more than a match for the great dhole rampage. It is a subtle enough anti-colonialism allegory. The final Jungle Book story, ---, is a melancholy affair with Mowgli all of seventeen years of age and although at the peak of his powers, no longer at the peak of his legendary status throughout the Jungle people. Dissatisfaction runs through him and he feels the pull of man and their civilisation. Man will always go to man, the animals have told him, and this troubles him but the problem of dual identities prove ongoing. What kind of existence and character could Mowgli achieve amongst mankind, where he will be as freakish and problematic as, say, Tarzan The Ape Man or Victor “The Wild Child”? But we are only left to imagine that, for Mowgli and his animal peers have already served their purpose in providing wonderful tales and criticism of civilisation.

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* Peter Levi, February 1986, introduction to: Rudyard Kipling, “Just So Stories”, Penguin Classics, 2000, pg. 8

Jose Mojica Marins will take your soul (part one)

2011-01-16T21:11:00.010Z

JOSE MOJICA MARINS WILL TAKE YOUR SOUL:

part one: The Coffin Joe Trilogy

“At Midnight I Will Take Your Soul” (1964)

“This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse” (1967)

“Embodiment of Evil” (2008).

“At Midnight I Will Take Your Soul” (1964) and “This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse” (1967) give us Ze do Caixao, or Coffin Joe: Brazilian horror superstar, played by the director himself, Jose Mojica Marins. The unusual point about this irresistibly titled horror double bill is that these are not the threats of our remarkable antihero and all-round bad guy, but that they are threats made to him. And what does Coffin Joe do to deserve these wonderfully ornate curses? Well, what won’t he do? And what debauchery he doesn’t do is not for want of trying, but more down to a low film budget. .

The plots of these two films are more-or-less identical. Ze is a cape-and-top-hat wearing gravedigger with apparent wealth, long fingernails (all the better for eye-gouging) and an irrepressible affliction for metaphysical and nihilistic posturing and oration. Alone or with an audience, he cares not. “Soul” starts with Joe glaring and pointing into the camera: “What is life?” Such soliloquies, often very much asides to the audience as if we are being taken into Joe’s confidence, are fundamental to Marins’ films, as much as the phantasmagorical silence sequences. However, I am cautious about quoting too much for I am not about to put much faith in the subtitle translations, but we get the gist. (For this reason, I shall refrain from close-reading of Ze’s orations.) Joe goes for the big questions of life, death, mankind’s disgusting nature and insignificance, his own superiority, and so on. How much of this is in earnest on Marins’ part, how much of an actual philosophical enquiry or how much the character of Coffin Joe’s madman’s ravings is perhaps not totally clear. But he is not quite the only one given to preaching: “Soul” opens with Joe doing so, and then we are given a bold credits sequence made up of the juiciest bits to come later in the film (!), after which we are introduced to a hammy witch who clutches a skull also addresses the audience directly to dare them to deny the existence of the supernatural and horror. At the very least, these monologues make for highly entertaining and absurd padding.
Joe likes to go into town to provoke and terrorise the locals by mocking their beliefs in the supernatural and religion (same thing). He goes about like some untouchable feudal lord. Ze spits viciousness at the locals and then monologues about his superiority, about life and death and other such cosmic considerations that may or may not defy that innate superiority. When challenged he lets loose with Mr Hyde-like bloodshot eyes and tantrums with a near superhuman fury and violence, always besting his challengers through sheer brutality. He murders those that upset him. But in these confrontations, he is always just the right side of superhuman; he is more extraordinarily savage and sadistic than demonically possessed. In fact he mocks the concepts of possession, ghosts, witches, God, and even the Devil, with whom you would expect him to be on pretty fraternal terms. Ze’s nihilism and belief in nothing but himself is all-consuming. This is the tale of Coffin Joe’s megalomania, his love-hate war against anything unearthly, his love-affair with cruelty and misogyny, plus his quest to become immortalised by having a son and passing on his superior genes. One of the perversions of Ze is that he genuinely values children, although this too fits with his egomaniacal vision of the universe around him. He chooses and pursues a woman who may or may not be worthy to bear his child, but in murdering someone unworthy, he is cursed by his victims - in the very words of the title!! - and ultimately has a supernatural experience that puts him in his place and is vanquished. It is all very Gothic and melodramatic and delicious in its search for perversion, which it frequently pulls off not by explicitness - although it has its moments - but by tone and intimation. And it is all highly engrossing with Jose Mojica Marins’ thickly layered acting, some successful minor surrealism and inevitable unintentional humour. This is very much Marins’ show as he directs, produces and writes himself into a frenzy, oblivious to budgetary or acting restrictions. Committing himself with a gusto that motors the whole enterprise, Marins chews scenery, sneers and quivers his lips in demonic disgust, raises an arched eyebrow for sadism, unafraid to give himself a long unbroken take in which he throws himself around the somewhat shaky set design and battles the forces of the universe against him. In fact, his face is probably a little too soft to truly carry off the EVIL, but this too makes him more fascinating and works to good use particularly in “Corpse” when Ze comes to accidentally murder an unborn child and is overcome with guilt … it is almost like acting. Coffin Joe demands to be a compelling antihero and theatrical villain in the manner of old barnstormers. You get the idea that he would happily take on all of Brazil, should it doubt his pre-eminence, and that like Ze himself, Marins is oblivious to nay-sayers.

It is like a Hammer Horror by Herschell Gordon Lewis, by way of the scratchy realism of “Night of the Living Dead”. But Marins is a real film-maker, and not a bluffer like Lewis. Considering it pre-dates “Living Dead”, the eye-gouging and axing and litany of torture Marins serves up may seem relatively tame by contemporary standards, but it feels quite verbose for the period and still carries a genuine frission of perversity and shock, a frission embedded in the very ambience of the film. In this sense, in a more overt interest in cruelty and gore and given the era, Marin feels ahead of his time. Coffin Joe himself feels like a Victorian villain gone amok, so it is somewhat a surprise to see buses and other such modern details creep in around the edges. Ze’s assault on the town, women and good taste still disturbs and shocks with its venom. There is also a Jacques Tournier-like claustrophobia to “Soul” … or should I say the use and aesthetic of the often D.I.Y. sets falls somewhere between Tournier and Ed Wood; or perhaps a downmarket James Whale. Zest and inventiveness and decent composition of shots compensate for any wobbly sets and limited special effects… it is hard to disparage effects that simply put glitter upon the film stock to achieve a ghostly aura.
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These films are full of ambition and genuine vision: Marin’s films nearly always open with striking credits montages that immediately set the atmosphere of depravity and chaos. As with the best of all low-budget successes, Marin barely seems conscious of restrictions and often experiments and goes for broke to achieve the effect he wants. The opening credits play with editing and text in a manner that forecasts the standard varied styles of late twentieth century credit sequences; even the closing maggoty corpse in a mausoleum finale of “Soul” feel like a precursor to some Fulci excesses (and Joe’s cadaver looks pretty horrible and explicitly mutilated too). He is always looking to experiment formally: there is the sudden shock in “This Night I Will Posses Your Corpse” where Coffin Joe descends into hell (for the first time) and the film lurches into sudden vibrant colour. Hell is psychedelic and full of neon colours and again it is remarkable how much hellishness Marins can conjure up with so very little: parts of bodies sticking out of walls, various other tortures and nudity going on whilst the underworld glows red, pink, blue, green, etc. Marins is never lazy.

In the manner of most sequels, “This Night I Will Posses Your Corpse” goes for bigger and adding more: Where “Soul” was almost entirely conceived, built and filmed in a small area of a hall, “Corpse” certainly opens up and reaches a broader canvass, having more confrontations set around town squares and other exteriors and not only within claustrophobic rooms and graveyards. In “Corpse”, the town and secondary characters are more of a notable sideshow: a (rather unconvincing) hunchback henchman for Ze - of course! It’s about time! - a one-eyed strong-man and, later, as if from a spaghetti western, a small gang of hired assassins. As typical of any sequel, it goes for bigger and fuller: where once he murdered his wife cruelly with a single Spider in “Soul”, in “Corpse” he torments a handful of barely clad lovelies with a whole bunch of creepy-crawlies. Later, as he seduces the winner in this dubious lottery of who he will decide earns the right to bear his progeny, he will do so as he murders the losers with snakes. Such motifs, like the themes, are both consistent and repetitive troughout Marin’s films: the inclusion of the natural world at the service of male tyranny appears again and again, touching on our fears of the least popular of creatures and also a long history of their association with the demonic. It is not the natural world that thwarts Ze.

Coffin Joe himself is quite an disturbing personification of misogyny and male arrogance, and although Marins is happy to film breasts whenever he can, the films feel more like criticism of masculinity’s malice and egotism. Similarly, Marins has suggested the films are condemnations of fascism and if one sees the Coffin Joe tales and the “Theory” episode of the anthology “The Strange World of Coffin Joe” as forerunners of Pasoloni’s “Salo”, we can see similar tricks being employed: self-indulgent and detached declarations of various theories about ‘perfection’, ‘superiority’, the death of “God” and so on, and how this leads to inhumanity, sadism, torture and slaughter. As polemics, Marin’s films may be clothed in exploitation and horror’s cheap thrills, but then so was the ostensibly more pedigreed “Salo”, and one could never doubt that Marin’s conviction or determination was any lesser than Pasolini’s.

From the colour sequence of hell from "This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse"

As Joe has all the trimming and lordliness of aristocracy, it is easy to forget that he is just a coffin maker and gravedigger. Indeed, his delusion of supremacy is not one perpetuated by class but simply of his sociopathic and psychotic disdain for all others. To him, his pre-eminence is something like a cosmic given, and undisputable fact, and this greatness, tied so closely to machismo, must be passed on to progeny. If only he can find the right and worthy woman. Any hold of affection to his one apparent friend and romances are short-lived as soon as he feels slighted. Everyone else is wrong and his narcissism knows no bounds.

Coffin Joe mocks the preternatural and he scorns both the Godly and the Satanic in equal measure; he is something far more primal and telling about man (and men). But inevitably, Coffin Joe must get his comeuppance and in both these early films, he has a born-again revelation and near redemption. It is the supernatural forces of divinity and vengeance rather than the natural world and his enemies that thwarts Ze. Is this, then, what Marins ultimately wants to say, that faith and God will prevail against corruption and cruelty? Or is this just another perversion… Coffin Joe finds God? Really? Doesn’t it feel like another black joke to close upon?

But you can’t keep a good villain down, and it seems that Coffin Joe neither truly died nor found enlightenment. No, rather he comes back as the “Embodiment of Evil” (2008), forty (!) years later, his fingernails longer than ever. A flashback to this third entry reveals that the ending of “Corpse” was only half the story, and therefore somewhat a cheat. After forty years in jail, Coffin Joe is released into civility again to shake his head at Twenty-First century children puffing glue in the streets. As soon as Ze hurls his first accusation of the inferiority of others, we know he has not been rehabilitated at all. Indeed, he pontificates about chaos, death and the universe as he ever did and it’s all wonderfully amusing. He is also an unrehabilitated misogynist and egotist, still demanding women be worthy of his seed and child. He sees a coffin and coos. When he first meets his little gang of followers - put together by his loyal hunchback in his absence - he simply asks them “What is real? (Answer: Life, and nothing else) And after life? (answer: The continuity of blood, or oblivion). What is the fate of the inferior beings? (Answer: Destruction!) It is all wonderfully ludicrous and we see that we shall be in for the same mix of ambition, invention, unintentional humour and bouts of true surrealism and horror imagery..In “Embodiment”, Marins himself now has a more weathered face and arguably age suits his old barnstorming villainy well. No, he has not changed a bit: the long nails, the cape and top hat, it’s all there. Has Ze’s/Marin’s strain of high-Gothic horror now outdated by the movement of real, streetwise horrors that have since become the currency of contemporary horror? A horror out of time in the Twentieth Century? Perhaps not: he is an early and quite unique example of the franchising of villains, certainly unforgettable, and all his eye-gouging, torture and bizarre side-characters seem totally at home in contemporary horror. Marins was quite ahead of his time and a genuine b-horror auteur. “At Midnight I Will Take Your Soul” and “This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse” was only the start of the Coffin Joe-Marins phenomenon: in Brazil, Marins has had Ze front a TV horror series and a whole host of other horror films (to be covered in following articles), and it is with these that Marins’ fascination with social decay and psychedelia really come to the fore. They also often included a post-modern depiction of horror, and one that combined both horror’s melodramatic artifice and the streetwise. Coffin Joe’s wardrobe was always out-of-place and anachronistic. In “Embodiment”, Coffin Joe may seem a relic but he takes to the new explicitness and penchant for graphic torture with revived gusto: it is as if an old Boris Karloff scoundrel learnt all he needed to about horror from the golden age of Seventies banned titles. The torture sequences and gore reach new heights and few gorehounds will be disappointed: graphic scalpings, people hung by hooks, etc., etc. And we may enjoy his excesses, but there is never the sense that Ze do Caix is to be celebrated: he is vile and poisonous and crazed. He is an argument for order and restraint in a manic universe. For all his monologues and consideration of the universe, he is wrong because his behaviour is abhorrent and deluded.

Marins pulls it all off because he believes in the medium of horror and not just one facet or the other. His reliance upon the Coffin Joe persona throughout his career has been inspired rather than tired out, always searching around what the character and his own celebrity means and represents. “Soul,” “Corpse” and “Embodiment” may be the main story arc for Coffin Joe, but between and around them Marins has been remarkably prolific and fascinating.

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But there is a need to backtrack. These three films may be the main story arc for Coffin Joe, but he was busy elsewhere too. Marins has in the meantime made over 30 films and developed a television series, and so this is far from the end of the story.

Let Me In (further notes)

2011-01-06T22:11:00.006Z

Firstly, I really like this promotional picture for "Let Me In". Probably better than the fingery one they finally went with. Simple, evocative and very much acting as if presenting a moment from the story that we never got to see (note the bare footprints).

Kim Newman - that funky horror critic and about as cult celeb as critics get, one side of Mark Kermode - thinks that Reeves' "Let Me In" is a better horror film than "Let The Right One In" (see his Sight and Sound review). He feels that the American version's streamlining of all the ingrediants make it more focused, which is quite the opposite conclusion that I came to. It reduces the original novel and Swedish adaptation to a far more conventional genre piece.

And slantmagazine's proposal that "Let Me In" is superior to "Let The Right One Is" is, well, just a remarkable misreading of what is conventional and what is not, and all but misses that Reeves borrows heavily from Alfredson's film when saying: "Reeves impresses his already jaded audience with stark images that reveal the story to be about impenetrability of the teenage mind, about finding a new language forged from exhausted images, and about combating inevitable world-weariness with fantastic violence and brutal romance." That is plainly wrong: go back to the original text and adaptation and it is there that you will find the transcendant images and "new language" if any. "Let Me In" is fun, but it ain't half as troubling, scathing and unique as the originals.

VALHALLA RISING

2010-12-30T18:19:00.007Z

NICOLAS WINDING REFN
2009 - Denmark/UK

In some ways, “Valhalla Rising” feels like a debut from a director come from making experimental short films which have been successful due to a triumph of atmospherics hung upon an ambitious but thin story. Director Nicolas Winding Refn is in fact a Danish director that has a commendable list of films exploring male violence which are both naturalistic in characdterisation and given to stylistic tics: “Bleeder”, “Pusher” and its sequels, “Bronson”. “Valhalla Rising” is a superficially different beast, taking a Viking drama and conveying it through a fog of dour atmospherics and often pretty visuals; again, like a young director exceeding the limitations of budget by sheer aspiration and verve. And, like many student films, there is a certain uncertainty of performance, despite the experience of the cast, threatening to sabotage the illusion of a visit back through time. Viking dialogue - which is a chief weakness - is conveyed in low, undecided tones as opposed to what we might mostly be used to: those grand gestures and intonations of other historical epics. But, despite the visuals and the grand intentions of this journey into the heart of darkness, there is something in the space left around the dialogue that leaves it feeling weak and searching for a hold. Refn’s intention seems to be to produce a neo-realistic tone, but the performances seem un-buffered whenever dialogue is spoken. It feels adrift somewhere between Harmony Korine’s guerrilla aesthetic and Zack Snyder’s infamous “300” stylisation, with a reach for Werner Herzog and even Tarkovsky’s elemental fascination.

Nevertheless, there is Mads Mikkelsen, who gives a wordless but magnetic performances that keeps the film grounded. Part ravaged hunk, part super-killing machine, an enslaved warrior robbed of one eye and his humanity. One-eye is kept caged and let out only to win fights: scarred up and seemingly forever on the verge of slaughtering anyone in front of him, initially his tale promises an study of the mystery and violence of this silent killing machine. The British Momentum Pictures promotional packaging uses cues familiar from Snyder’s “300”, giving the impression of a blood-soaked war epic with Mikkelsen leading a helmeted army, and none of which represents the film at all. Although “Valhalla Rising” is arguably just as stylised, it is far from the pulp absurdities of “300”. Almost all the gore and violence is up front in the film - including an unforgettable evisceration - for when One-Eye is free and we might presume a tale of extended wrath, he acquires a friendless boy (Maarten Stevenson) as a kind of spokesman and finds himself joined up with a small gang of crusading Christians. They are setting out to create a New Jerusalem - or rather, their apparent religious leader is and the others seem along for the promised treasures the conquered Holy Land will bring them.

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Then follows what may be, the gut-wrenching and bleak early passages aside, the film’s most successful sequence. The boat journey combines the elements of odyssey, otherworldiness, silence, naturalism and formal experimentation with pace, plotting and location that Refn otherwise struggles for elsewhere. Others may find this sequence interminable, for it is here that Refn goes from brooding, slow-paced doom with spasms of violence to a more dissonant sense of plot and increasingly abstract meaning. The claustrophobia of the boat is tangible, seemingly stranded in fog and undergoing a passage into another world as surely as the Bowman going through the light-show of “2001”.
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“Valhalla Rising” is an antidote to the bombast of so many other historical warrior epics. It is not grandiose like a Ridley Scott recreation; it’s visuals and beauty rely not upon set-design but the natural world, the foggy mountains and damp rock faces, the doomy and drained landscapes, accompanied by a heavily ambient soundtrack. It is a brief tale: gaining his freedom as a slave for fighting, One-Eye goes to hell, those around him find nothing and go to pieces, and he finally meets red Devils. It is a exercise in anti-climax, a heart of darkness that goes nowhere and probably signifies very little. Had Refn lost many of its modern stylistic affectations, it may have headed in the direction of, for example, “The Valley of the Bees” in recreating a long lost era in a realistic manner. Nevertheless, for all its flaws, “Valhalla Rising” remains a fascinating experiment throughout.

The Best Things I watched in 2010

2010-12-27T17:56:00.004Z

An end of year list - of course! Here is a run down of the films that I found hit the mark with me, excelled, etc. Some are new, some are old... 25 favourites in no particular order:

Where the Wild Things Are - (Spike Jonz, USA, 2009)
The Road - (John Hillcoat, USA, 2009)
A Prophet - (Jacques Audiard, France/Italy, 2009)
Kick-Ass - (Matthew Vaughn, USA, 2010)
A Serious Man - (Coen brothers, 2009, USA/UK/France)
Afterschool - (Antonia Campos, USA, 2008)
The House of the Devil - (Ti West, USA, 2009)
Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs - (Phil Lord & Chris Miller, 2009)
Lake Tahoe - (Fernando Eimbcke, Meixco/Japan/USA, 2008)
Do You Remember Dolly Bell? - (Emir Kusturica, Yugoslavia, 1981)
Martyrs - (Pascal Laugier, France/Canada, 2008)
Diamonds of the Night / Démanty noci - (Jan Nemec, Czechoslovackia, 1964)
A Swedish Love Story / En kärlekshistoria - (Roy Andersson, Sweden, 1970)
Valley of the Bees / Údolí vcel - (Frantisek Vlácil, Czechoslovackia, 1968)
The Cremator / Spalovac mrtvol - (Juraj Herz, Czechoslovackia, 1969)
Libero (Along the Ridge) / Anche libero va bene - (Kim Rossi Stuart, Italy, 2006)
The Bridge / Die Brücke - (Bernhard Wicki, West Germany, 1959)
Box (Three... Extremes) - (Takashi Miike, Japan, 2004)
Picnic at Hanging Rock - (Peter Weir, Australia, 1975)
Valerie and her week of wonders / Valerie a týden divu - (Jaromil Jires, Czechoslovachia, 1970)
Barry Lyndon - (Stanley Kubrick, UK/USA, 1975)
House of Voices / Santa Ange - (Pascal Laugier, France, 2004)
Waltz With Bashir / Vals im Bashir - (Ari Folman, Israel (et al.), 2008)
The White Ribbon / Das weisse Band - Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte - (Michael Haneke, 2008, Germany (et al.), 2009)
Deadwood - (TV: all of it)

What have I learnt from this list? That I apparently discovered the Czech new wave in a big way and that I obviously think Pascal Laugier is one fine horror director.

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And ten more of note that I liked or found of note -

Scott Pilgrim Versus The World

We Are What We Are

Four Lions

La Antea

Life During Wartime

The Girl Next Door

In The Loop

Pontypool

Moon

My Way Home / Így jöttem

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And the worst that I saw this year... and yes, they are horror films.

The Unborn

Pirahna 3-D

Death Tunnel

Where The Wild Things Are

2010-12-27T13:39:00.005Z

WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE

Spike Jonz, 2009, USA

A work of staggering furry near-genius.

Spike Jonze’s adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s much loved and brief book engages with the unnerving freedom and aggression of Max’s free-fall play from the very first minutes, as he chases the dog around the house, like a delirious hunter. The handheld camera follows and jumps around with him and the effect is dizzying, liberating, and just a bit scary. This opening and the following drama surrounding Max’s snow fort capture the ups and downs of play effortlessly ~ play makes you high and when it doesn’t go as you want it to, it’s throws you low. The magic of Jonze’s film is that it never, ever losing sight of the pell-mell violence behind rough-and-tumble play: at any minute, it might go horribly wrong.

The dog is okay, but Max’s snow fort does not fare so well, and neither does his mother. In a tantrum of attention-seeking and jealousy, Max bites her and, apparently horrified at his own behaviour, sets out on his own odyssey from the house to sort himself out. Even the journey to the island of the Wild Things is fraught with peril: the waves threaten to toss his little boat and drown him. The dangers of Max’s world all seem very real and likely, all larger than life and exaggerated. Upon meeting the Wild Things, his friendship with them and Max’s hold on them by proclaiming himself a king always seems precariously ready to end up in something terrible due to any of their unpredictable mood-swings and penchant for aggressive play. The Wild Things themselves embody a whole host of difficult, affectionate and fraught relationships: immediate family; a gang of new friends; various facets of Max’s own personality. The Wild Thing Carol seems most to represent Max’s temper and destructiveness as well as an immature father-figure. Has a bunch of giant puppets ever been so dangerously temperamental and morose? They are all like Sesame Street muppets in need of therapy and anti-depressants. As special effects The Wild Things are a mixture of real costumes and CGI tweaking, and are remarkable and scary in their size and physicality. They smash, they wreck, they tear chunks out of trees, they throw one another around without sense of consequence.

It is like a grunge film for pre-teens. The soundtrack by Karen O and the Kids amplifies this feeling: it surely won’t be to everyone’s taste but it’s an often jubilant, crash, strum and shout accompaniment that relates well to Max’s energy. The work of the voice actors, all seasoned professionals, is also exemplary: James Gandolfini especially uses his very nasally, snorty and sighing voice to excellent effect for Carol’s sulkiness. Jonz captures Max Records as Max at just the right moment, encouraging a wonderfully open, fluid performance. It is free from the brattishness and knowingness of so many trained American child performers. When he declares nonchalantly “I have no plans to eat anyone today,” it is irresistible. He throws both a great temper and confused remorse, both totally in thrall to and nervous of the monster-sized character traits around him. Max maybe isn’t the all-scowling tearaway of Sendak’s book, but he is a more fully rounded, conflicted, variable character: by turns needy, volatile, sweet, unthinkingly mean, et cetera. He is as dwarfed by the intimidating moods-wings, judgements and needs of the Wild Things as he is by his need to play and to be the kind and the centre of attention. Rarely does Jonz miss the child’s eye perspective and feel of his surroundings: even when the monsters bundle into a mountain on top of him, the dangerous claustrophobia is tangible and, wonderfully, Jonz turns the bundle into tunnels that Max crawls through. Just like a fort.

Jonz and Eggers draw a clear line between the troubling relationship between creativity and destructiveness: it is not mistake that Carol is the most artistic. Where does one end and the other begin? When does play become dangerous? Where does neediness end and selfishness take over? How, indeed, to find the compromise between all these things? In the end, Max has worked as much out as he can for himself and, as he leaves to go home and start over afresh and, we would hope, wiser and more controlled, all that is left is a gorgeous, plaintive, primal howl. Well, until Max goes home barking at the dogs in the yards. And he is still wearing the wolf suit. You have to stay yourself, after all.

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A farewell love letter to temper tantrums.

A film for kids that treats a kid’s irrational temper with respect.

TRON

2010-12-19T20:56:00.018Z

Stephen Lisberger - 1982 - USA

Although I never actually saw “Tron” when it first came out, I was still mesmerised by its look. I was in possession of one of those novelisations, the movie tie-in, inevitably adapted by Alan Dean Foster, which was bisected by a few glossy pages of stills from the movie. It was from those stills that I discovered “Tron’s” distinct look; the luminous blues and reds mostly. Of course, when I finally saw “Tron” for the first time as an adult, I was instantaneously disappointed in the somewhat lukewarm script, and a story that had seemed so much more threatening in the captions beneath those book stills which implied dark corporate intrigue and gaming adventure. The actual film is a far frothier affair. “Tron” suffers from that weakness that undermines many a special effects extravaganzas: fascinating and original big sci-fi concepts and contexts given to a recourse to the flimsiest of storylines that draw from tired tropes and stock characters (from “Logan’s Run” to “Avatar”, etc.) . Yet the look remains sumptuous, timeless and fascinating. And not forgetting that, apart from the visual aesthetic, “Tron’s” greatest achievement is the possession of an all-time great action and sci-fi sequence with the legendary bike race.

Atari had barely made the promise of things to come when “Tron” created a world where the players become their virtual counterparts. Avatars and virtual identities allow us all that, perhaps without the cool glow-in-the-dark costumes and Frisbee hats, but also without the risk of being wiped out by a megalomaniac, demon-faced computer system. Critic John Brosnan probably misses the point in his taking the “Tron” to task for being illogical and unscientific:

“True, video games are controlled by computer chips, but that is no reason to suggest that the internal workings of a computer would be visually analogous to those of a video game.” [1]

There’s worth to this criticism, should you be looking for plausibility, but it bypasses the fact that, narratively, “Tron” draws far more from fantasy and fairy-tale conventions than from science-fiction: the lone warrior drawn into an alternative reality to defeat a seemingly omnipotent overlord; ‘magical’ weapons and steeds; an odyssey across an incredible otherworld - all these are the fantasy tropes that pulp science-fiction long ago adopted. They are the devices and props for the adventure and one would search in vain for “Tron” to be considered as hard science-fiction and the exploration of what science might give to us (as, say, “2001: a space odyssey” might). “Tron” barely skates the trite Good versus Evil dilemmas of the “Star Wars” franchise, and it is not overburden with ridiculous and vacuous philosophical affectations of the “Matrix” series, but the similarities of appearance between the real and virtual world does give “Tron” faint allegorical pretensions. Everything from inside the computer to the genuine cityscapes, and even the gliding point-of-view searching camera in the arcade, all share the same computer-game aesthetic. The world, “Tron” says with its overall look, is one big computer chip or grid, and were are but players and programmes, etc. It does at least give the sense that we are dwarfed not only by technology but also be the products of our imaginations, and entertainments. The danger of technology is also prevalent in the Master Computer MCP’s ambitions to take over the world and run it better than the humans, joining the ranks of megalomaniac computers such as those from “The Forbin Project” and “Demon Seed” and many, many others. The idea that computers (and robots, etc.) will achieve total sentience is another science-fiction fetish that in truth speaks more of human beings tendency to anthropomorphising the truly inhuman.

Brosnan goes on to berate the method that transforms players into their cyber-counterparts: a laser that allows the computer to store molecules and reassemble them into their original form. I doubt that any sci-fi kid worth his salt would truly buy this as probable in a second. Any kid knows this is pseudo-science, that it is a just techno-babbling means of allowing the real kick that “Tron” promises: the promise that, tomorrow!, we will be able to BE those characters in those fantastically virtual beautiful worlds of heroism and adventure, not to mentioned the unleashed Id (but we are a long way from the failing realities of “Videodrome”, “eXistenZ” and Philip K. Dick here). Were the creators of “Tron” really ignorant of the science or simply patronising the young audience, Brosnan asks? Well that audience knew exactly how “Tron” logic worked: it is the same Olympian magic that allows the Gods to animate giant steel statues, to transfer Chosen Ones from one world to the next, and, say, for E.T. to breathe Earth oxygen without trouble. For the thrill of hard, plausible science, you would have to look elsewhere.

The far more interesting question is what the hell Jeff Bridges is doing in there? He has one awesomely dated and unintentionally funny moment when he rolls into the arcade, fastest player in town, and then proceeds to kick ass on a game that runs at the speed of a tractor. If the internal world of “Tron” graphics still manages to seem somewhat ageless, this opening arcade sequence reminds us of how far the gaming and virtual world actual have come.

Nevertheless, we do live in a world where Tron, the character, and all his associates and enemies, have had their own MySpaces. So do the characters of “Back to the Future”, “Child’s Play” and a whole bundle of other cult and classic films I haven’t even ventured to look up yet (I myself am friends with Mr. Barlow, for example.) The adoption and merging of real and pop culture identities, character transference, projection, the world of surrogates and avatars, must be enough to power a hundred university modules. Be friends with Tron and enjoy the groovy neon colours of his MySpace! (… and of course, MySpace itself seems increasingly retro and by the time you read this, it probably is, if not dead and gone.)

What Disney thought it was investing in is baffling… wait, no, what about all those tie-in “Tron” games? “Tron” was undoubtedly considered a children’s film. It was a new dawn, when films still inspired computer/arcade games as a rule and not vice versa and the crossover potential was still barely realised. The look and reality-jumping promises offered in “Tron” has far exceeded its malnourished concept and screenplay. “Tron” is like a great band with a weak front man. Even as the visuals try for subtext in presenting everything as a gamescape, the terrible pacing and exposition does its best to kill off elements such as suspense and brilliant reveals: e.g., we get to see the bikes before any kind of plot has even occurred so that the sequence mostly exits autonomously rather than driving narrative.

What remains is that even after the meteoric development of special effects, not to mention CGI, the “Tron” design still remains pretty much unique. It looks like a silent black and white sci-fi, coloured in with fluorescent pen, which is again a clue to its agelessness: it looks as if it spans centuries of cinema, then and now, and in that way transcends the limitations and passé design of its proposed future look for game systems. Just look at the poster that heads this article: see the silent-screen clasp of the romantic interest; how old-fashioned it is and how it is projected into a vision of the future. And it is very pretty. An example of look overcoming content.

[1] (John Brosnan, The Primal Screen: a History of Science-Fiction Film, Orbit, Macdonald & Co, 1991, pg. 350)

WE ARE WHAT WE ARE

2010-12-06T22:42:00.004Z

Jorge Michel Grau,
2010, Mexico

---- Although comparisons between films is often just a flip manner in which to cash in on another’s reputation, as well as critical shorthand, it is easy to see why “We are What we Are” has been dubbed the Mexican “Let The Right One In”. It’s because both films are interested in their protagonists’ emotional, home-baked relationship to the horror they are involved in: the horrors are tied to more mundane daily anxieties and barely repressed angers, alienation, poverty and needs. The concentration on the domestic is vital: one of the terrors of “We Are What We Are” is surely how bleak the household of our cannibal family is; how devoid of any culture other than ‘the ritual’, how blank the walls, how limited the family appears to be in experience. They apparently spend all their time sitting around brooding, doing nothing, squabbling, or preparing for the kill.

When their father drops dead from a poisoning in a shopping mall - the mall staff drag him away and wipe up after him: it’s a broad but nonetheless effective symbol of the disposability of the poor - the wife, two sons and daughter that he leaves behind are thrown into turmoil. Family dynamics become strained: a fight for dominance between the matriarch and the eldest son; the rivalry between the more thoughtful and empathic elder son and his younger sibling; the careful manipulations of the daughter/sister, who proves to be the real force behind the family in light of mother’s insanity and the brother’s volatile and insecure natures.

Later, the eldest son’s other secret surfaces: we follow him as he shadows an openly gay man and his friends to a club in perhaps the film’s best sequence, revealing a colourful, pounding, liberated world that he has barely ever seen. His first pursuit and taste of another identity seems to come as a revelation. Inevitably, allegiance to the family overrides all, and the general ineptitude and emotional issues of the family weakens their ability to keep a grip on things.

There is even a moment of pure farce when the eldest son brings his first victim home, only to find his mother already has one in the bed. Slowly, the violence increases and distresses and the gore comes full on. The film works on a slow burn: we have had a clue as to how abominable their practices are when the brothers first attempt and fail to kidnap a child, but by the end we are in no doubt how horrific their ritual actually is. If it all ends typically in grand guignol style, it is not surprising, probably needing to lay bare the awfulness of their oppressive lifestyle and cannibalism. Additionally, as if to drive home how the desperate become monster types, the local prostitutes seemingly become a gang of zombies, moving in upon the family to exact their own revenge. Elsewhere, the police are bumbling, boorish and given to slapstick.

“We Are What We Are” casts a bleak and blackly humorous world in grainy low-budget style that has seemed so suited to horror since the Roger Corman quickies, through “Night of the Living Dead” and “.Rec”. Grau's film is llikely to be a minor cult classic, and probably exactly the kind of thing getting commentators envisioning a new wave of Mexican horror. But it is focused, resting upon its broad tying-in of horror and poverty motifs, mounting dread and a number of fine set-pieces.

SUDDENLY

2010-11-27T16:29:00.014Z

Lewis Allen - 1954 - US

In a little, sleepy, Republican town of Suddenly, a officer pauses to share a joke with someone passing through that “things happen so slow now, the town councillor’s figuring to change the town’s name to Gradually.” But it’s name comes from a time when it was a wilder place of gamblers, road agents, gunfighters, probably prostitutes, that kind of thing; the kind of people that make things happen ‘suddenly’. It shouldn’t be forgotten what kind of wildness built the town.

It’s a regular ol’ day in Suddenly. The most conflict seems to be when Sheriff Tod Shaw has a little tiff with the female that he is after, Ellen Benson, because he buys her son “Pidge” a cap gun when she has expressly forbid it. She is still grieving for the loss of her husband in the war, you see, and abhors symbols of violence. Oh, he explains that it’s not the weapon and it’s the man, et cetera, et cetera, but she isn’t having any of it. The Sheriff’s affinity with violence seems also to be one of the reasons she is playing hard to get. Her father-in-law is also tired of Ellen’s anti-violence moaning. She is, after all, just a woman and doesn’t understand that there is horror and Evil in the world that can only be resolved and fended off with counter-violence. But not to worry: her silly, womanly anxieties and philosophies will soon be shown up for the bunk they are when three hoodlums take over the family house for a plot to assassinate the President of the United States who is apparently - or suddenly as it may be - passing through. What follows is a little chamber piece in which decent people and hoodlums argue it all out whilst they wait for the assassination attempt.

Conversely, Ellen Benson (Nancy Gates) would be better off without Sheriff Shaw because he’s an asshole, and as performed by Sterling Hayden, a wooden chunk of an asshole. He is belligerent and bolshy with the life-long ease of a born bully; juvenile in his responses to Ellen, swaggering with the unintentional humour that posturing machismo always brings. On the other hand, if she wasn’t such weak tea, she ought to notice that assassin John Baron is played by Frank Sinatra and is a far more interesting man. Sure, he’s a murderer, but so is her beau and her father-in-law because they were all soldiers: Baron brings with him an interesting questioning of what it means when a Nation trains its men to kill. This grey area is quickly resolved by the Sheriff distinguishing between good and bad soldiers, those that come home to take on authorities roles such as cops and secret agents and those that liked it too much: Baron was born a killer, even if, as he says, “They” taught him how to kill. His mental health is probably more a result of this innate psychothic nature, the fact that he was left in an orphanage, that kind of thing, rather than a result of war trauma, of course. He’s a bad seed, see?

We are a long way from the home invasion scenarios of “Funny Games” and the like, but nevertheless there is a fair hard edge to the proceedings. The film implies Baron’s sadism and instability as much as possible, whilst never losing his hoodlum hat, and it’s fairly zesty with the expendable cast. Thanks to Sinatra’s performance, both mean and vulnerable with eyes full of uncertainty and a gutted sense of his own emotions, we have no doubt that he is capable of carrying out his threats against “Pidge” and the President. Sinatra brings the whole set-up alive in a community of otherwise stock types and rote performances. The film may try to side-step the issue of what turning men into killers might do to a generation, but he is far from a whiner about his lot and he does help to puncture the posturing of the ex-servicemen around him just by being there. He is also living the American dream of Capitalism and firearms: he doesn’t have any feelings about his job, he is just doing it for the money and marking his place in the world by killing when told and paid to. It’s just business. Baron may be wrong, but that doesn’t make the little conservative enclave he invades right just because of their pretences at patriotism and overall recourse to violence which is just as quick as his, although arguabloy justified as self-defence. Writer Richard Sale also can’t help but give Baron the best dialogue either. The irony is simple: the bad guy bring with him the dark edges of noir and is the only point of fascination in the film, the near only thing with blood running through it’s veins. Sinatra is good casting: he is tiny compared to the hulking Hayden, but Sinatra holds his own by doing and not swaggering. Only with the TV repairman - who may as well wear a target on his chest when he turns up late in the proceedings - played by James Lilburn do we get another actor actually awake and complex, simultaneously confused, outraged, bemused and shocked.

It is all highly implausible, of course, with the feel of an expanded play. The play with the cap gun and the television set is quite neatly handled, right under the assassins’ noses, and the ending - and we’re never in doubt as to the how things will turn out - gives both “Pidge” and Ellen a chance to resolve issues with a firearm. That’ll learn’em. And later, it will be the Sheriff playing hard to get and Ellen doing the chasing. That’ll teach her.

PIRANHA 3D

2010-11-23T23:01:00.005Z

Alexandre Aja

2010- US - 88m

Alexandre Aja’s gore-and-soft-core 2010 “Piranha” remake is so unapologetic in its apparent disdain for audience and cursory intellect that that it is thoroughly critic-proof. Nevertheless, I shall endeavour to outline some key reasons why this piece of shit doesn’t work.

It’s horror for hecklers, for what they call trolls, for those that really have no interest in any investment in character or story. What they want, and what they get, is tits and ass, blood and dismemberment. So gratuitous is it in its misogyny that it ought to be parody. This outrageous misogyny is the film’s chief joke, extreme gag-gore it’s second. All this is explained by a spring break festival of hedonism based around Wild Wild Girls with constant gyration on boat decks. Girls shake booty; boys ogle. But “Piranha” offers no commentary: what happens is that this perpetually dancing and lusting cast of extras are so loathsome and vapid that we don’t give one toss whether they live or die. The nastiness of the piranha attacks are an end in themselves, and so cartoonish and CGI-buffered that they are empty of identity and really give nothing up for the audience. There is some cursory suspense wherein our key protagonists are stuck on a boat and need rescuing, but the fact that it all ends with an explosion only feels like one more condescension - because isn’t blowing up everything how endings work? - and then this is topped off with a stupid, stupid coda.

How odd that Aja, having staked a reputation with the flawed but full-on horror “Haut Tension”, seems to have fallen into America by way of remakes that no one really wants. I myself warmed to his updating of “The Hills Has Eyes”, but in “Piranha”, his capacity for outright nastiness is anchored to nothing and his sense of atmosphere nonexistent. It is as if the Weinstein brothers, producing, and director Aja know the film was worthless at worst and slim at best and simply threw in more and more tits. Guys will pay to see that, right? Twentysomethings - that key demographic - love to see their own kind acting like assholes and then slaughtered en masse, right? Ever since “Friday the 13^th”, we know this. Setting up an appalling spring break community (which need not be appalling) and then slaughtering the lot isn’t criticism of that culture: it’s just setting up the skills to knock down. When we get to see a piranha cough up a half-chewed penis, you know horror has reached quite a nadir and the filmmakers don’t care. The audience laughs both with and at the fact that the film has no care.

You may or may not agree that it’s insulting. The audience I saw it with treated it as a comedy, and sure enough it is, but it is the bassist, crassest humour. It has more in common with the “Scary Movie” franchise than, say, the Joe Dante original. It doesn’t even have the breezy inventiveness and anarchy of Troma Studio’s bad taste films: it’s much, much better made, but aside from the boundary-breaking breast bonanza and general, silly nastiness, it’s really a tidy little package. Inventiveness and anarchy, you see, are not condescending to an audience; simply amping up the lesser qualities of b-horror is. And no, it is not satire either.

As the lead teenager being teased into the spring break craziness by Kelly Brook - rather than, you know, being tied down to the responsibility of baby-sitting and browsing porn on his laptop for light relief - Stephen R McQueen seems to try his best to be a convincing and charming every-guy just about to learn the joys of adult indulgence, but his efforts dissolve into stock scenarios. Interestingly, it is Kelly Brook who, in the brief time she gets, manages to evoke something like an real interesting character: playful, gorgeous, unapologetic, independent, plus mature. Now, if Kelly Brook had been the one to cut through the bullshit and save the kids on the piranha-besieged boat - all without changing her bikini - then maybe there might have been something interesting here, something a little critical of gender types in horror films. That would have been a whole lot sexier and more interesting to debate. But, alas, no: Kelly must go the way of any hot girl who indulges in naughtiness. She has the best and most genuinely amusing joke - the opera-scored nude swimming duet - and seems a wasted opportunity.

Dante’s original is a cult favourite, and no one thinks it’s a masterpiece, but it is mischievous, fun, engaging, satirical, nasty and witty. “Piranha” 2010 has mostly tedious American cookie-cutter acting, thin characters, a bunch of non-starter cameos (Eli Roth, for one, which might clue you in to the standard), and all the piranha and gore generated by CGI you could want. Oh, and it has 3D. Tits and 3D: that should bring them in. The 3D enhances nothing. The technology may have improved, but 3D still won’t improve a film. It works best with beams of light shining underwater (the underwater lake sequence is the best scene because, for a moment, the films looks real pretty and there is a real, fleeting sense of dread and otherworldliness). Otherwise, it often looks just like bad Photoshop work (the opening whirlpool sequence is especially bad). What we are left with is a horribly cynical horror film cashing in on a relatively respected cult item, puked up over the frat boy horror fan who likes being puked on - because that’s funny; a film with no real shelf-life due to its artlessness. A film that casts American culture as a wasteland of self-absorbed decadence, vapidity, and one that thinks that the tits and cocks of this culture being eaten is the stuff of great sight gags. It’s junk, but not in a good way.

ADVENTURES IN FILM #1

2010-11-19T21:02:00.013Z

FAVOURITE SCENES: “LET THE RIGHT ONE IN”: the pool scene.

Occasionally, a film makes you say something aloud, or shout something at the screen. Oh, I have seen people calling advice and names at “EastEnders”, cursing the news, but that’s not what I mean. I have heard stories of audiences shouting at screens things such as “I would kill that guy!” and so on, but that’s not what I mean. I am talking about something even more primal. I am talking about when the film you are watching and all the elements - sound, vision, mis-e-scene, pacing, atmosphere, characterisation, etc - coalesces into pure story and all the elements hit the right note suddenly you realise how film reaches places you maybe never quite knew were there in a film. And you say something out loud because you are delighted and in awe.

I was watching “Let The Right One In”, with love, soaking it all in, thinking what a brilliant horror and brilliant bildungsroman it was… I was totally invested in Oskar’s situation, fearful for him as a victim of bullying, as a somewhat naïve and sweet soul, fearful of him as his unresolved need for revenge seemed to tap into the latent psychopath squirming in his gut and the hand that held the pen-knife. His relationship and investment in Eli, who remains impregnably enigmatic, was fraught with danger and gore and alive with affection and loyalty. But how were they going to resolve it?

Horror endings, especially, are notoriously weak, disappointing, stupid. I am a horror fan, but it’s the truth. But I had not read Lindqvist's novel, so I had no idea how it would sort itself out, or not.

And then: the pool scene.

The bullies have contrived to corner unsuspecting Oskar in the pool, where he is trying to do something for himself (now that Eli has gone) by learning to swim. They, on the other hand, have come to punish him for whacking the chief bully about the head with a stick, costing him his ear. Chief bully has brought along older brother, who is evidently of a more murderous nature. Chief bully’s henchmen don’t seem so sure, seemingly equally scared of carrying out the increasing cruelty and scared of not doing as they are told and losing … status? Power? Comradeship?

Then there is only Oskar and the four bullies, no one else, and the brother is holding his head underwater. Eli the vampire is conspicuous by absence.

Oskar is in slowed-motion underwater, drowning in dull pool blue. All is quiet. The brother has discovered his capacity for doing the unspeakable. The bully henchmen are slowly being traumatised by their complicity, not really having that same capacity, but in too deep. Oskar is drowning and we are underwater with him, watching. Bubbles float. And…

Wait. What was that noise? Huh? Wait!..? Is that… is that screaming? We are still underwater so all other sounds are muffled. The brother’s hand still grips Oskar’s hair, pushing him under. Then a foot flies past the screen…!! Two feet are flying across the pool, just under the surface of the water, kicking!!

And it was at this point that I said to the screen, out loud and clearly: “Oh my God.”

Because my jaw my dropped, my heart in my throat, my sense of drama, film, story and horror in my throat too. Oh wow. It seemed to me that, rarely, does a film find the totally right way to film a moment, that it was rare to see such a horror scene – a vengeance scene, a slaughtering, the horror money-shot – filmed in such a way.

So: trying to disentangle the sounds that are muffled to work it out. Oskar still floats, half-dead perhaps. Oh, what a perfectly pitched scene: pure cinema, pure horror – all about what you don’t see, triggering the imagination, trusting the audience, focusing on what matters – Oskar’s life! – whilst not skimping on the horror. A decapitated head falls into the pool distance. Jesus. Crunch! The hand holding Oskar down becomes detached and falls away with its disembodied arm. Oskar hasn’t even seen, his eyes closed. It is like he is dreaming all the vengeance, or like he has summoned it. Perhaps he has.

Now a hand reaches in and gently lifts him out. He drifts to the surface.

Above the surface comes Oskar’s head. He opens his eyes and he is looking into those of Eli. He smiles. Yes.

And then: a wide-shot of the pool: in the distance, the headless body draped over the side of the pool: the body of the bully henchman who, really, had he taken time and listened to conscience, could have been a friend to Oskar and saved them all a lot of grief… perhaps. Perhaps he really was that mean and treacherous. Hard to tell. Another of the film’s perfectly maintained ambiguities and mysteries. In the foreground, the ravaged corpses of the chief bully and his brother and, to the side, the other henchman, still sitting where he had sat earlier in terror when realising they were going to drown Oskar, and he is quietly sobbing.

Chills, thrills, drama; horror through sounds and hints but never holding back on the gore either. Such a fine balance. A scene bringing Oskar’s vulnerability to breaking point, never losing sight of him, and in that, never trivialising the albeit mostly off-screen slaughter as merely a shock-piece either.

And when he smiles at Eli, that is it. It is the best and the worst thing ever for him. He is simultaneously found, safe, lost and salvaged by horror. Should you care about such things, it is a cinematic moment transcending genres, one that proves that horror can be rife with both gore and humanity. A film that keeps me rooting for horror as a genre capable of reaching places unlike any other. And one of my favourite scenes.

Notes on why "Let Me In" is not "Let The Right One In"

2010-11-18T22:31:00.022Z

Notes on why "Let Me In" is not "Let The Right One in"

When I was a boy, I would buy comics, read them and then, with my collection of felt tips, I would colour them in. It didn’t matter if they were black or white: if they were colour pictures, I would simply go over their red with my red, etc. What a hideous act of destruction, I think to myself in retrospect (those comics could have been worth loads now!). But it also appears to me that my act of vandalism was a side effect of coveting the artwork and stories I so enjoyed. With ruinous tools, I attempted to claim them for my own and, yes, perhaps even improve them. It also occurs to me now that this is much like the art of the remake.

There is no getting around comparisons with the original, and that’s why these words are going to be about why “Let Me In” is not “Let The Right One In”. This is only marginally different from damning one with contrast with the other, but I do want to distinguish that this is my agenda from the start. What we have is Thomas Alredson’s “Let The Right One In” being a masterpiece, the superior adaptation of John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel, and Matt Reeves’ decent version called “Let Me In” being an American remake of the Swedish film. In fact, the original’s instant classic reputation was/is still warm and spreading when “Let Me In” was made. I shall agree to a large extent with Victoria Large that “'Let Me In’ may be a song that you’ve heard before, but it still sounds great.” If “Let Me In” is a lesser version cashing in, it has only itself to blame, for that is predominantly the domain of the remake and the nature of the beast. Let this be less a straightforward takedown of a remake for not being the original, and more a exploration of why it isn’t. Reeves' film may be a different take on the novel, but it seems likely that it would never have been made if the Swedish film had not become such a cult success. Reeve’s film should not be condemned for any perceived lack of thorough fidelity to the source; making alterations and taking liberties does not automatically flaw an adaptation ~ Alfredson and Lindqvist left out entire chunks in their translation onto screen, after all. In fact, variations and liberties should be encouraged in the hope that they illuminate the original text. It is all about which choices and variations are made: will they illuminate, strengthen or sabotage and weaken?

The title: somehow, the abbreviation, or truncation, of the title is a big clue as to how “Let Me In” compares with its predecessor. “Let The Right One in” - thank you, Morrissey - as a phrase is full of ambiguity, suggestion and scope that “Let Me In”, as a title and film, does not possess. Once the remake was annouced, its pending inferiority was predicted, for the majority of sequels are anticipated to be so, and it does not disappoint on that score. “Let Me in” is certainly not a bad film, being engaging enough and a decent variation on the original tale, carrying a lot of atmosphere and seriousness; but anyone suspecting that a translation to American cinema would neuter much of its resonant detail will have their conjectures confirmed. “Let Me In” does little to dispel a widespread view that any Americanisation (i.e., Hollywoodisation) of a foreign film will simplify if not “dumb down” a more layered and intelligent original. Indeed, there is the infamous case of the terrible subtitling of "Let The Right One In" with the first Ameican DVD release, prime evidence that American translations tend towards "dumbing down" (and you should definitely look here at Fright to see how appallingly a non-English language film can be treated in translation).

And arguably, “Let Me In” does suffer from a neutering, a simplification of all the fascinating and discomforting elements of the Swedish originals, book and film. It is poorer because it is more average, in its adherence to a more traditional genre template, to the very tropes that the originals managed to a large extent to refresh. “Let Me In” is inferior in its persistent obviousness, in making much of the primary mystery explicit, in its more mediocre dialogue and black humour. It is lesser in the obviousness of its vampire make-up, in its recourse to CGI to assist in creating a more inhuman monster (and no, I am not letting “Let The Right One In" cat scene off the hook). Anyone immersed in both the horror and the coming-of-age genre will find things simply more conventional in a way that Alfredson’s film avoided. Reeves’ film is enjoyable, but often uncertain, often copying the Swedish predecessor, ditching the tricky stuff, lacking the challenges and true poignancy of the earlier film. “Let Me In” is more than passable as a remake, but it simply misses so much. Remakes have the difficult goals of both being faithful ~ which usually mean duplicating original material ~ and staking their own identity. One could look to the American remake of “The Ring” to see a remake that actually amplifies and successfully varies the scary tension of the original. Rob Zombie’s “Halloween”, for all its flaws, definitely justifies its alternative take on the original story and commands its own individuality. “Let Me In” simply does not diverge enough, or in an original fashion, and even on its own terms it comes over as too obvious. Everything is sign-posted and tagged. Michael Giacchino cues every response he thinks we ought to be experiencing as if scoring a more needy drama in need of emotional overstatement.

“Let Me In” includes nods to all the major points and characters of the original story ~ many crucial secondary characters are name-checked and pass by (listen for a mention of Tommy, a key character in the novel otherwise absent in both films) ~ but they are all swept away to focus on the young romance. Groan as Owen (previously Oskar) is reading “Romeo and Juliette” for school. But this narrowing down does not cause sharp focus: again simplification occurs. This means that Owen’s dyfunctional family is reduced to brief banal ‘they’re separated’ dialogue and squabbles. When Owen’s mother is propped next to a finished bottle of something ~ alcoholism playing a major part in “Let The Right One In” ~ here it looks like crass shorthand. Whereas “Let The Right One In” comes with a fine catalogue of side characters, the adult support in “Let Me In” mostly evaporate. So a woman goes up in flames (and in keeping with the film’s add more ethos, takes a nurse with her), but it’s simply a set-piece shocker, for we do not know her at all and we don’t care, we’re just suitably horrified. More shorthand: curious and investigative locals are replaced by a single generic Detective - gone is the sense that Oskar’s community has been left to rot, to fend for itself, that there is no protection from or effective law, that any horror can hide there.

In the original, the whole of Oskar’s frozen community seemed sodden with the scourge of alcoholism, an epidemic numbing all human affections, leaving them reeking of despair and dead ends ~ and that being the promise of Oskar’s future. I do not agree with David Jenkins that, in “Let The Right One In”, “eccentric characters are thrown in as story padding” (1): the stir crazy locals are crucial to Oskar’s alienation, his circumstances. In “Let Me In”, this is absent and loneliness and alienation is created by the sense that Owen barely even meets anyone. The backdrop somehow possesses none of the winter-chill eeriness of the original either: rather, the courtyard is bathed in light that is something between bright warm oranges and piss-yellows. This, although apparently caused by the courtyard lighting, seems an odd choice as it robs the story and film of its natural temperature. The one time the film really makes use of Winter is the remarkable image of a corpse in an ice block being pulled out of the lake. Otherwise it’s just footprints in snow.

All this, one can argue, is simply a shift in emphasis for a different market; others may see these details as evidence of “dumbing down”, the occasional uncertainty of tone I earlier accused “Let Me In” of.

When we first meet Oskar in “Let The Right One In”, he is toying with a penknife and, unforgettably, mimicking his tormentors at school ordering him to squeal, little piggy. When we find Owen indulging in this, he is emulating how his persecutors call him a girl. The shift is striking: it evokes homophobia and the denigration of the feminine: they try to verbally castrate him. How very American a translation. Less abstract, primal, and less evocative. This Are you a girl? insult and provocation ends up carrying all the gender confusion that the original novel finds so crucial. (2) In the novel, it is as if Lyndquist wants to push his young loners beyond gender, so that their friendship transcends the problems of gender and social relations. The novel also has a more difficult and distressing portrayal of sexual monsters that could never be fully moved onto the screen. Consequently, for example, Hakan ~ Eli’s adult protector and the most problematic character who, in prose, carries a horror that outdoes Eli’s vampirism ~ is almost entirely devoid of complexity or character in “Let Me In”. All the ickiness has been carefully, surgically removed. Eli is now simply a vampire girl. Hell, Owen even keeps his pyjama top on when Eli comes to seek chaste comfort from him in bed.

If it was not for Chloe Moretz ~ still fully hyped from "Kick Ass" ~ it is easy to imagine that Abby (previously Eli) would also become very vapid by comparison. (3) There is good stuff between her and Kodi Smitt-McPhee as Owen (still hyped from his turn in "The Road") ~ a nice retro-moment in an '80s arcade ~ but as competent as these young actors are, they are left a little stranded with mostly unchallenging dialogue and an unevenness of tone. They don’t feel as iconic and a right as Hadebrant and Leandersson. Their playfulness is lost. They have the loneliness, but not the tangible fury and despair of the original, because “Let Me In” is missing that breadth of context; it is afraid to allow Abby and Owen the full range of what and who they truly are, and the film simply lets them drift through, actors struggling for bearing, plot dragging them towards the conclusion when so much of it should be guided by their characters. When Owen discovers the truth about Abby, it comes as a total shock to him, for beforehand he has not really been shown to have suspicions about his new friend; the element of an impending Faustian pact of sorts that must be made just to gain friendship, that too is vague. Trampled apparently by the romanticism of “Romeo and Juliette”, their relationship has the gore but lacks the chilling revelation that the need for friendship can be a horrifying force.

We are never afraid of Owen, but this is less due to Smitt-McPhee’s abilities than this reduction of the key relationship being put down to simple adolescent loneliness. With Oskar, as played by Kare Hedebrant and his terrible hair in the Swedish adaptation, we felt that his consummate alienation and torment at the hands of others make him a potential psychopath in the making. It is that piggy stuff: he mimics his tormenters so furiously and bitterly. When he hits his bully across the head with a branch, we might feel he has crossed a dangerous line, but one that was always a part of him. He got a kick from it and we feel he wants more. Oskar relishes. He is, we feel, reaching his full potential. When Owen does it, it is simply self-defence: no real moral complexities are evident; his soul is barely at stake. Even providing Owen with a little “Rear Window” voyeurism early on doesn’t ultimately trouble his character. It is worth quoting Matt Reeves himself (still respected from Cloverfield) to demostrate that he gets so much of what Oskar is about, and yet cannot carry this over so very clearly and starkly in Owen, who is a far more pacif, rudderless character:

"...there's something very interesting about a 12 year old boy growing up in a world where he's bullied so mercilessly that he deserves revenge but he does not know what to do about it. He's so helpless, and how could he not be? He's only human. He has those feelings. And yet the world around him is telling him those are evil thoughts and that they mean he is evil.Because there's none of that within us, we are fundamentally good. And wouldn't he not understand any of that and feel lost?" (4)

This sounds interesting, a summary of a fully formed character and context. But this is not particularly the character of Owen that we meet. We do not really see him being told that his thoughts of revenge are evil. Keeping this quote in mind, when Owen calls his father and asks if he believes in evil (neatly, the father is so self-obsesses he thinks this is just Owen's mother poisoning the boy against him), perhaps we are meant to sense Owen's confusion about his own desire for violent revenge, although it is all so vague that we might feel he is simply referring to Abby, who he has discovered to be inhuman. This reference to "evil" also seems paricularly American, as if American horror can only see monsters and violence in terms of an abstract, religious context, which the original sources are very particular about side-stepping. But Owen's reference to "evil" is a non-starter and barely contributes to what comes after.

What Reeves does offer that is new is something not found in either the novel or the Swedish adaptation: in place of an eerie, distressing locker room scene, a botched murder attempt, we get an action set-piece: it is a fairly breath-taking and scary car crash as viewed from within the vehicle, and it is probably the only truly original and virtuoso set-piece “Let Me In” has. The other set-pieces mostly copy, paste and add more gore. In his “Little White Lies” review, Adam Woodward waxes that “Let Me In” is “bloody and unabashed”; that the “eerie quietude so deftly composed by its predecessor is here ousted by bloodcurdling screams and eye-watering violence” (5). Perhaps I am jaded from too many modern European and Asian ‘extreme’ horrors, but I cannot say I saw much of the bloodcurdling, the screaming and eye-watering violence, or no more than the average modern horror. Nevertheless, “Let Me In” is probably bloodier than "Let The Right One In". By the time we get to the pool scene, wondering if perhaps this version will be able to pull out a different angle, what we get instead are a thick wodge of horror orchestra and simply more limbs and blood in the pool, and therefore none of the sheer originality of Alfredson’s careful use of sound, angle and hints. So of course it would be possibly impossible to out-do the original pool scene ~ a total, horror classic ~ but to simply trace over the original and add more bloodiness… was that even trying? Sometimes more blood simply seems desperate. And here, again, Reeves misses the tiny details that mean everything: the apparent and increasing confusion of cruelty and conscience of the main bully’s henchmen; the way Eli leaves just one alive, traumatised. And then, in closing somehow, someway, the brilliant openness and ambiguity of the original ending feels narrowed, somehow explained and less troubling (and Hakan’s birthmark is another groan-worthy cue that undoes much of the mystery once it appears in some old photos Owen sees). It has less resonance because the rest is a more confirming, more straightforward telling of a modern classic. And then the strings swell.

It has to be said that Giacchino’s score is a terrible offender. It cues in every emotion, every horror as if worried we just aren’t getting the undercurrents. And in that score, as well as the abbreviated title, we find everything that “Let The Right One In” was not.

It must be noted that "Let Me In" is the first film from the revived Hammer Studio Brand. Not a bad start, even if it seems a safe bet to cash in on a previous established title. Hammer was, after all, a certain kind of exploitation. Welcome back then. Better than Amicus' return with "It's Alive".

(1) David Jenkins review for “Let The Right One In”, Time Out Film Guide 2011, (ed. John Pym, Time Out Guides Ltd, London, 2010) pg. 609

(2) One friend called this version of the knifing-the-tree scene embarrassing, badly acted and executed.

(3) Another friend feels that Moretz is badly cast and that this scuppers the whole film.

(4) Matt Reeves interview by Jonathan Crocker, Little White Lies Magazine, issue 32 nov/dec. pg. 76

(5) Adam Woodward, "Let Me In" review, Little White Lies Magazine, issue 32 nov/dec 2010, pg.77

Lunar Engine: live acoustic EP

2010-08-13T13:57:00.002+01:00

I don't usually post about my band here, but here is a freebee of an acoustic set from summertime Berlin.

Please help yourself to some downloads!

Lunar Engine Live & Acoustic at art.gerecht Berlin. by Lunar Engine

"...and dead in winter" - published

2010-08-11T14:58:00.005+01:00

I am quite chuffed to announce my first venture into self-publishing. As a survivor of bad adolescent angst-poetry - a habit I have tried to drag out from the soul-sucking cosmic monster of ego and into some form of maturity and, damn it, coolness! - I have put together a collection of 50 verses/poems (whichever sounds best to you) and 12 black and white photographs in a collection called "...and dead in winter". Preview below. Cheers!

Cinema is dead. And too slow.

2010-08-03T13:27:00.004+01:00

So having watched Michael Haneke's "The White Ribbon", I inevitably flipped over to rottentomatoes.com to see what others thinks. Or, as I like to think of it: let's see if my opinion and thoughts on a film can take a pounding by those less and more in the know that myself (mixture of ego and an insatiable desire to learn seems to be my motivation). Sometimes, my mind gets changed a little; a lot of the time I wonder if I was actually watching the same film as the reviewer. Occasionally. what I consider to be wrong evaluations - extremes of negative or slobbering hype - can burst my appreciation of a film like a frog in "The Reflecting Skin". Recently, I was shocked to discover that a truly reaching, probably highly insightful and definitely important horror film like "Martyrs" had received very little respect and praise; and then that Jane Campion's "In The Cut" - which I found to be flawed but very credible and worth discussing - also received disgust and somewhat sneering dismissal. A gorgeous effort such as "House of Voices" also took a pounding - for why, I ask? Didn't the reviewer just see the same film I saw (you know that feeling)? Maybe I was wrong to thoroughly enjoy and respect it. Hell, it's enough to damage one's highly regarded self-opinion, or at least cast shaky ground beneath. Luckily, I don't expect my films or movies to be flawless, so that helps, but... No, those are good horrors/thrillers, and I know all I need to know to defend them.

But anyway, firstly, I am fully aware of being just another blogger with opinions, and I don't have academic credentials in film (I do in Literature and History, so I hope that counts for something), and no one pays me, so bearing that in mind, I'll continue...

SLOW!

... So a key complaint, when glancing over opinion for "The White Baloon", is that it is slow. Or, as I like to imagine it, adopting petulent wine: sllloooowwww. As in, Why is it so slllooowww?? I don't know, it's like the critics have barely seen a non-English language film. God knows what they would do with "Satantango" (and look here for an excellent discussion of Bela Tarr's film and the meaning of long, long takes and long, slow films). As far as grievances against films go, I don't give much credit that 'slow' is automatically a failing, that 'slow' is always negative by default, although the implication always seems to be that slow is problematic, if not derogatory. I usually see it as pacing. Often I find what others complain as slllooowww, I call stately. I find it absorbing; that the film is breathing; that there are spaces, often for contemplation, or simply to sit back and wallow in the visuals, in the story, in the suspense, etc etc. I often find that many 'deleted scenes' on dvd extras that are cut due to 'pacing' could quite happily have stayed in... Terence Davies' "House of Mirth" was a victim of this. These extra scenes, the quiet digressions, I often find give breadth, fuller context, meaning, characterisation, and so on. Not always, evidently, but quite often. I probably feel that Jarmusch's "Dead Man" is too long, but that is part of what is it, part of how it absorbs you; and I don't think it is too slow. Pacing is everything, and so many big films fail to trust more measured pacing. "Casino Royale": great pacing; "Quantum of Solace": not so much (although it's a lot shorter, it's too quick).

My friends used to have a running gag that the films I liked were probably Russian and involved three hours of watching a glass on a table.

FAST!

On the other hand, I have also been reading up on the film blogosphere on Oh noes teh death of cinema because of shaky-cam and fast-fast editing. Wintergrass' "The Bourne Ultimatum" seemed to kick this discussion off in earnest. I felt the third Bourne film a solid example of how fast editing and hand-held camera didn't have to necessarily be incomprehensible. Others disagree, but the rooftop chase and final fight that comes at the centre of the film seem to me to an excellent, precise use of contemporary fast-fast aesthetic without actually losing a sense of geography or action - I understood where each of the three runners were in relation to one another all along the chase. It was, I thought, a rare example of this, of attention to geography and physical proximity between characters, and the fact that it was done with contemporary rush-rush editing was more impressive. For the most part, I care little for fast-cut action editing because, well, that geography, context and coherent action all seem to get lost.

The very stateliness of cinema seemed to be under threat, detractor's of fast-fast, shall we say post-MTV, editing seemed to say. Some commenters stating they didn't even watch modern films anymore, that they were pretty much worthless cinema, etc. Of course this is patently not so because there have been a considerable collection of great films worthy of discussion of late, both arty and genre, some mainstream too. Some films use hand-held and mobile (won't say shaky, necessarily) camerawork wonderfully: "The Wrestler" uses mobile camera to follow and keep up with Mickey Rourke, to catch him at both his most unguarded and glorious, angry and benevolent. "28 Weeks Later" had some great prowling mobile comera. Rob Zombie's "Halloween", it seemed to me, had a mobile camera moving around to poke in the white trash grue to then suddenly settle of precisely composed, if lopsided, framing. Yes, I thought, that's what so much mobile camera doesn't think to do. It was both probing and random, then fluid and deliberate.

Too slow. I think that many conflate slow with dull. Dull is the generic, the stereotypical, the weakly conceived, the contrived, the underwritten, the barely trying. Dull is another misogynistic rom-com. Dull is another ludicrous action flick full of daft macho posturing. Dull is another indulgent arthouse film. Dull is... oh, one of the many rudimentary horror films I can't help but try out. Dull has more to do with context than speed.

I think that some may conflate too fast - or too shaky - as undisciplined, dumb, as trash, and not cinema. I thought "The Bourne Ultimatum" was a great sprint and not so stupid. I thought "The Quantum of Solace" was fun, but less cinema and more entertainment, whereas I felt "Casino Royale" to be both in equal measure. Sure, the fast editing of "Aliens versus Predator" was incomprehensible, and that was trash, and I didn't even bother with "Transformers". One of the granddaddies of fast-fast was "Natural Born Killers": no, I didn't think it had much to say, whereas the far slower "Henry: portrait of a serial killer" was a whole other world of insight. Something like "Van Helsing", which is fast, was dull as roadkill because it was just bad. And speaking of roadkill, "Death Proof" was dull because it was indulgent, badly paced and annoying because it was so busy pleasuring itself. "Cloverfield" - which is always going to be mentioned in such a debate - had a great premise but failed to mostly utilise it's found-camera footage convincingly; brilliant at catching glimpses of parts of the monster, but lousy at being consistantly credible (put down the camera and run, you idiot). It carried a lot of hand-held action around tediously executed character drama.

DON'T PANIC! ENJOY!
Myself, I prefer a slow-to-medium pace, which is surely evident from what is written above. Or rather: I like films to breath. I love to sit in a cinema and soak in something like "The White Ribbon". Oh, I may have issues with it, but pacing isn't one. I expect a film like that to take it's time, to keep on going, indeed, not to finish in what seem to be a timely manner. I thought "Idiocracy" was too fast, and wanted it to slow down for more funny digressions of the idiot culture it portrayed; it felt too slight, too short. Sure, sometimes you think, Get on with it! but that is less about pacing than narrative and reveals and simply good writing. I will happily watch mid-temp, middling films with quirks - not every film watched has to be monumental. Or Awesome. Awesome is the correct word, I believe.

To say that cinema is dead is surely to reject the pleasure principal of film, as both cinema (i.e., worthy, serious, exemplary, transcendant) and entertainment (i.e., fun, delightful, trivial, exemplary, transcendant). This, of course, it probably why I will not receive a job in "Film Comment", but I do not believe elevating any art form to the pedastal where elements of enjoyment and fun are lost is a worthy or humane pursuit. Because, you see, I write this blog in case my viewpoint entertains or *deep breath* helps to enlighten someone on a film; this is why I go to other's blogs, after all. To say that you reject modern cinema is, I believe, absurd and only your loss. It does not make you any further right about the canon either. To say a film is too slow usually means you aren't paying attention to what is actually wrong with the content. I don't care: I adore "The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford", because it is recent worthy cinema and it is stately, and I enjoy it for these qualities, amongst others. Its length, pacing and contemporary context are all part of that.

So: the best you can do is to accuse "The White Ribbon" of being slow? And: cinema isn't over - step down and look around a bit. Sure, a lot of mainstram movies - as distinguished from cinema - are generic, intellectually and morally myopic, but hasn't that always been the case? And mobile cameras are just part of the language of film-making now, and there shall be good and bad examples of how this is used.

And of course, you can always punish a film by not watching it. I, myself, have been successfully punishing 99% of American mainstream comedy for decades now. Oh, and "Titanic" too.

"The Road"... and the cracks in it

2010-07-28T15:08:00.010+01:00

Haha, Philip Challinor - the excellent author and sharp-edged political commentator - takes a chunk out of Cormac McCarthy's "The Road". He is right. I find myself being in the camp of being a fan of "The Road", and remaining a fan, even though the perceptive and enlightening criticisms of it that I have read seem totally correct also. Naturally, part of the issue is that Cormac McCarthy is a huge literary name and that he receives the kind of praise and worthiness that surely needs to be taken down a peg or two. [1] I dig McCarthy. But Challinor is very right on the issue of the moral challenges of the novel: namely, that if you are looking for that, "The Road" cops out. What follows, then, is my acknowledgement of Challinors correct deconstruction of "The Road", or at least its lofty status, and also my defence, rationalisation and allowances of the novel as a fan. I am hoping not to lapse into excuses.

I like that Challinor puts "The Road" in its proper context - science-fiction, if not horror - and grades it accordingly. Challinor's opening is a fine slice of iconoclasm:

"If you'll pardon the blasphemy, Cormac McCarthy's The Road is not a very good book. It is not an uncompromising vision of the Apocalypse; it is not a brutally realistic vision of the end of civilisation; it is not more frightening than the most frightening horror story; it is not more convincing than the best science fiction; and it is not a brilliant allegory of parenthood in the dangerous twenty-first century."

And here we shall differ, because I think it is and remains a good book, despite the flaws. Challinor's key argument seems to me to be that it does not go far enough; or rather, does not go far enough to warrant it's reputation of incomparable bleakness. Whenever a true moral dilema comes up, McCarthy throws in something new to divert the true test of the father's "goodness" and paternal love. He never really has to decide should I kill and eat another human being to keep myself and my child alive?

To me, "The Road" is a little by-way off of the true uncomprosing, brutally realistic vision of the Apocolypse and one of the most chilling horror stories and allegories ever: Robert Kirkman's "The Walking Dead", which I consider to be one of the greatest slabs of horror and humanitarian writing in genre fiction. Yes, I am going to add ever to that too. I have a hard time imagining how McCarthy might have stumbled onto "The Road" without at least someone having mentioned "The Walking Dead" to him. But it is then not so much the plot and its convulutions that generate the truth of the grim reputation of the novel so much as the context, conceit and sparseness of prose that create the harshness. It is in the atmosphere and execution. The feel of the novel alludes to the worst happening to the father and son at any moment, even if the magic of storytelling intercepts at just the right moments to pull them back from the brink. This aftertaste of a crumbling natural world and civilisation holds up long after the convenience of discovering a bunker stuffed with food (which, of course, is a moment designed also to provide our protagonists with a moment of reprieve and civility: for the father, it is the memory of civility and for the son a fleeting introduction. It is meant as a contrast to the outside world, evidently, and the episode would perhaps be successful at this if the father was faced with scenes that truly test his humanity. Just how hungry are they? We don't see them at the stage of eating algae or dry leaves for sustenance, for example). The mood triumphs.

Challinor does not believe that the boy would be the herald of the virtue in a world overrun by cannibals. Challinor on the scene where the son chastises his father for the way he treats a thief that tries to steal from them: "A child in a highly dangerous post-apocalyptic landscape, with only its father to rely on, would join its father in humiliating and murdering the thief, and give the corpse a good kick in the face to show it just how good the good guys can be." But, indeed, not every scenario has to be that way, surely? Not every child needs to be barbarous to make a point, and surely the challenge McCarthy sets himself is not to have a barbaric child, and the quest his father undertakes to keeps him from that barbarism. But I would say that Challinor presents an unassailable argument as to why McCarthy fails this challenge: as he puts it, something always comes along to circumnatigate the father away from the truly messy choices.

Again, I see no need to turn every child into a stray from "Lord of the Flies" in such a scenario, and I can swing with the idea that, with only his father's evangelical stress on being "the good guys" and keeping him away from any other survivors, the son may well find himself the bearer of conscience and the desire for a better world that came before... especially when: something always comes along. I would also suggest that the paradox of children is that they are as innately sweet as they are barbaric, and that some fall more one way that the other due to character, environment, influences, etc. They are naturally as fascinated with being good as they are with bad behaviour.[2] Under the sole, stifling influence of the father, why should this not be so for the son?

My conclusion is doubtlessly not going to satisfy detractors, and probably not some fans either, but in light of Challinor's accurate squewering of its Achilles' Heel, I read "The Road" more as a fairy-tale. A fairy-tale in its rendering of the son as a "pure" character, as the father as a knight of sorts, both travelling in a world of monsters. A fairy-tale in that something always comes along, that convenience and coincidence always strike where most appropriate (like in those good old canonical classics!). Challinor feels it fails as an allegory, but I don't think it fails consistently or completely. For just a moment, I doubted someting would come along at the end. Of course it did and anything else would feel unbearable or take a longer novel to resolve. A more devastating ending would have the son falling into cannibalism - either as victim or feaster. As it is, he has to rely upon something always coming along which, for myself, I do not believe is such a cosy coda. But I believe it works as fairy tale, although detractors may see this as excuse-making and fans may see this as a challenge to its lauded verisimilitude.

As Challinor states, you have to go to, say, Harlan Ellison's seminal "A Boy and His Dog" to find the real moral dilemma of this scenario faced. This ground has been well covered before in science-fiction and horror, and by McCarthy himself. I propose that what was seemingly new and transcendant about "The Road" for many was that they had not read the key genre fiction that mattered, that had gone before... if they read genre fiction at all. "It's a horror novel!" I would tell people, because I read in "The Road" something that I have seen evident in mainstream cinema: the appropriation of horror motifs and excesses that had previously been found only in cult and b-rated cinema. I can see "The Road" as a crossover success, from the lowly sewers of the horror genre to the bookshelves of the literati. The literati, of course, ought to slum it a little if they liked this stuff. I recommend "The Walking Dead".

So Challinor is right, but I am a fan and, making allowances or not (as you must do with any work of fiction) I believe "The Road" still stands as an important work of post-Apocolyptic speculation, for its atmosphere, prose and crossover status if nothing else.

I recommend Phillip Challinor's anthology "Radical Therapies". The first story, "The Little Doctor" in particular is a fine example of how he deals with ethical challenges.

[1] I do not like Picador's new packaging of McCarthy's novels. The cover is a stack of words: the novel title stands out, surrounded by lines extolling the brilliance, importance, etc., of said novel. In the case of "The Road": "a work of such terrible beauty that you will struggle to look away." I will? Really? Jesus, that's a tall order and deserving of a kicking. Challinor's review certainly cleans out the works to get some perspective back into viewing the book's weaknesses and strengths. Blurb has replaced art and design on the cover. It is as if you can simply congratulate yourself and take yourself out for a celebratory meal just for buying it.

[2] I recently watched "The Girl Next Door" and was struck how the film and Jack Ketchum's source novel credibly presents a throughly good character faced with the potential of his own ability and complicity in torture and inhumanity. His goodness is innate and wins through, but not in a way I consider to be trite: characters of Goodness can be wearisome, but they do not always have to be so, for they can represent natural moral awareness, empathy and rightness of action. I believe it is possible to see the son in "The Road" in this light also, and that such a character does not necessarily have to be the representation of natural childhood cruelty; one might also argue that that might have been the easy characterisation and certainly the novel would have fallen into into the exploitation/horror genres more visibly.

THX 1138

2010-07-26T21:42:00.015+01:00

George Lucas, 1971, US

It does feel as if two quite different directors helmed “THX 1138” and “Star Wars”. Not so much that you can’t see where the Stormtroopers, comedy robots, gadgets, slightly detached and simplistic characterisations and the limited colour and hardware palette came from; but it is different enough that “THX 1138” feels like the work of a low-budget, b-movie arthouse auteur rather than inventor of the modern blockbuster cinema. “THX 1138” looks made by a cult director who would go the other way and create further formally experimental genre pieces, rather than the great sweeps and crowd-pleasing pulp sentiment and action of Luke Skywalker versus Darth Vadar. “THX 1138” also bears the kind of clinical, slightly visionary Dystopian qualities that can then be found in seminal science-fiction literature such as “We” and “Brave New World”, and films such as “The Andromeda Strain” and “The Forbin Project” through to “Code46” and “Eden Log”. With its eerie and disturbing future conceit with brilliant design and a slightly abstract presentation, "THX 1138" has the appearance of mature, ‘hard’ sci-fi rather than pulp, although it is ultimately as much pulp as, say, “Logan’s Run” and “Planet of the Apes” and the like. Indeed, Lucas opens with a homage to early “Buck Rogers” films before introducing us to his Dystopia, as if to directly say: ‘we started with the passionate adventures of pulp, and we ended up with this.'

It takes a moment for us to even identify whom we shall be following. We are thrown into this world instantaneously by the means of distorted, overlapping dialogue tracks, mostly jargon relating to work; by surveillance and observation camera shots, as well as a gallery of shaven-headed monitors, workers and random civilians whom we can’t particularly distinguish. Walter Murch’s fantastic sound-design demands to be taken seriously as both a character in its own right and as the film’s true triumph: it is omnipresent, simultaneously disorientating and informative, verging on white noise. Lucas is bold in using an almost Brechtian use of disorientating sound track, clone-like appearance of actors, filtering events through other cameras. He is not an artful director, but he knows how to frame a shot and not get in the way.

One of the best early shots is that of the surveillance camera view of an accident at a plant in which explosions wipe out several running staff… the figures are distant, unclear, a little pixellated and distorted on screen, and this makes it all the more chilling and real somehow. Watch for the worker who shoves his colleague back into the danger area, shutting the door on him, only to be blown away himself: it is an action shot that achieves verisimilitude and extra horror, rather than thrills, by being viewed one step removed by the audience, via a screen within the screen they are watching.

Best of all, rather than a lot of exposition, Lucas conveys the details of this world through visuals and audio: it is a familiar Dystopian narrative - hapless THX 1138 is the rebel against an oppressed, desensitised society when his house mate LUH messes with his compulsory drug intake and they have forbidden sex - but it is made more abstract and fascinating by being interrupted by tiny interludes and to the incidental workings of society around our bewildered protagonists. People watch a sports match. A police robot amuses a bunch of kids. People work, walk, step into booths where they make confessions to a Jesus-like picture… which are recorded and monitored, or simply stored away with millions of other confessions. Even towards the end, Lucas pauses to introduce more details that flesh out the society: Donald Pleasance - as SEN - reminisces with some kids about how when he was a kid, education came in huge bottles rather than the mini-intravenous bottles the children have taped to their arms as they play. This is one of the film’s most successful visual achievements: we see the children as the appear at the top of an escalator, the “lessons” intravenously fed into their arms, conjuring up the image of hospital patients on a conveyer belt, churned out into society.

The culmative effect of this visual and aural collage, as Chris Basanti says, is of 'a fractured tone poem".

Finally, we settle upon THX himself, and it is Robert Duvall. The film benefits immensely from a wise cast: Duvall and Pleasance especially know how to work this material. Duvall does much with a limited role, conveying a slow awakening of awareness and character. Pleasance does a neat line in borderline creepiness and befuddlement. Maggie OcOmie manages to squeeze in the film's real source of humanity in the brief time she is on screen as LUH. But performances are not the key to the film's success,

Elsewhere, Lucas creates a whole web of criticism: blundering bureaucracy, stolid police brutality (which has its own plot-free hologram-show for violence entertainment!); faux-passionate law and trial gibberish; the intelligentsia… it’s all here. As ever, police states and conformism are the umbrella targets. Although much of it feels timeless (in the era of the police taser, the police brutality sequences ring especially prescient), Dragan Antulov at Draxblog places “THX 1138” firmly as a result of the 1969s:

“The futuristic underground world is natural progression of everything which was wrong with Western civilisation in 1960s – faceless and bureaucratic state is as oppressive as those behind 1960s Iron Curtain, while the consumerist culture is as tasteless and worthless as in 1960s West.”

Perhaps the best gag is the subversion of the drug culture scare: in this world, it is illegal not to take drugs. Government prescribed and prone to make you a virutal working zombie, of course. All this is a fine elaboration on Lucas' original student short film, "Electronic Labyrinth THX 4EB": this THX has some slightly psychedelic allusions: a slightly hippyish theme song, some flashing lights. 4EB runs through a world of white, concrete and steel, and the powers that be struggle to contain him from afar electronically. The key ingrediants, including the ultimately startling and ambiguous final shot, are all present and correct, but the full drollness of this Dystopia is not quite in full view.

"THX 1138" is a very white film. The walls, the uniforms, the shaven heads. When THX 1138 across the cell with Donald Pleasance in tow, they are very shocked to encounter a black person. The only black people they know of are the masturbatory holograms of people of colour dancing naked to jungle rhythms and cracking wise on holo-TV. For the moment, let’s sidestep the Lucas' future problematic use of racial stereotypes for alien characteristics (looking at you, Jar-Jar Binks, Yoda, et al). The black man THX meets is a hologram, who has just wandered out of the virtual world to see what the real one is like. It’s a nice enough gag, but what it says about the technology of the world is hard to pin down: that technology has achieved sentience of its own? That the film has suddenly forsaken the realism of its hardware and technology and stepped into fantasy? But it also hints at a world where, say, white privilege and prejudice has successfully eradicated people of colour and minorities, reduced them to ghosts. Indeed, the casting seems to bear this out, for it is seemingly populated solely by a pale and bald population. People of colour are relegated to holograms, personifying the baser needs of white people (e.g, sex and humour). But the hologram is not exactly the black comedy relief, thankfully, and in fact brings a warmth to the last act absent from the sterile world. Some end result of white man’s Puritanism and perhaps Conservatism is, then, the Dystopia that THX 1138 lives in.

It is also quite pithy about heroism. THX 1138 isn’t particularly a hero, or a rebel. He comes to his rebellion by accident, but once LUH messes with his meds and he ends up in the shared cell-space, it is pure frustration that initially drives him on. Lucas subverts the idea of the prison by making it ostensibly wall-less and endless white, simultaneously claustrophobic and agoraphobic. Pleasance’s SEN also has designs on THX 1138 and subverts the system to get them to share living space; THX turns him in and this is how they end up in the cell together. SEN talks of revolution and argues with other dissidents and criminals about rebellion, society and what they will do and what it all means. They philosophise and debate and yet do not do the simplest thing, which is what THX ultimately does by getting up and walking out on them. This leads to escape. Thereafter, he seems to run and carry on simply to see what happens. Meanwhile, lagging behind, SEN simply gets a taste of the world beyond and retreats back into what he knows, paralysed by the thought of real adventure and escape.

It is here that the most evident touching-up effect in Lucas’ 2004 Director’s Cut restoration of “THX 1138” appears: Pleasance stumbles upon a CGI bug - which chatters in one of those comedy-like alien noises that Lucas so loves. The CGI seems out of place, a rude anomaly in a retro-classic - but it is not gratuitous, for the bug does at least have purpose: encountering the bug makes SEN back away from the possibility of braving the unknown. Elsewhere, the updated special-effects fall mostly seamlessly into the film, fleshing it out, showing that when a director goes back to tinker and insert the next generation of special effects technology into an old work, it doesn’t necessary need to look like a jarring graft job.

When I watched “THX 1138” the first few times as a teenager, much of the dark humour was lost on me; at first, for me it was all about a scary prospect of a future society. Now, it is the satire that truly satisfies, and it is this that makes this a film that rewards watching numerous times. ‘THX 1138’ is full of haunting stark visuals and clinically chilling demonstrations of a technologically fixated authority, one that is bureaucratically flawed, as befitting of the best Dystopian science-fiction. The design, aesthetic and agenda are consistent and compelling. For all its starkness, it is loaded with fascinating details and deadpan humour. Unintelligible trials, impenetrable technical jargon, creepy and blundering police robots, workers casually making errors and not taking responsibility for them... In the end, THX1138 escapes simply due to police force budgetary limitations. It is a wonder how the genuinely satirical eye that conceived “THX 1138” disappeared by the time the inane philosophies of “Star Wars” came around. 'It is also interesting that Lucas cannot maintain the grim "1984" tone throughout the movie," John Brosnan writes [1]. Indeed, it is as if Lucas wanted to get this serious stuff off his chest before returning to “Buck Rogers” and getting on with space opera. And, of course, we now know which led to the money.

[1] John Brosnan, "The Primal Screen: a history of science fiction film", (Orbit, Lonodn, 1991), pg. 156

Drag Me To Hell - rerun

2010-07-26T14:04:00.009+01:00

Watching "Drag Me To Hell" again I am struck at how thoroughly it works as a portrait of a woman - Christine (Alison Lohman) - apparently traumatised by an eating disorder and self-esteem issues (first review here), . This, of course, is manifest in her delusion that she is being gypsy-cursed and hounded down by a Lamia demon; a delusion compounded by her unfortunate trust in a bunch of con-men mediums and experts in the occult. She wants to be free from mouth-fixated demons and they want her cash.

With a second viewing, it becomes apparent that the Raimi's know exactly what they are doing, because all the clues and cues are there - how the demon appears at stressful moments when reflecting on how she used to be overweight or confronting food; the many down-the-throat violations also tell us a story. Indeed, the banquet of continuity and logic issues make total sense, and only sense, when in the context of Christine's delusions.

And, which I missed the first time, the subtle clues that her boyfriend especially knows that she has mental health issues. "She needs help," he says when her mother says that Christine is sick. Upon a first watch, I thought the fact that boyfriend's mum comments that Christine is sick was just an indication of her bitchiness, but second viewing seems to hint that, well, she knows something, and so does her son and that's why she doesn't approve of their relationship and it's not all about class.

That the film situates the manifestations in Christine's latent and not-so-latent prejudices and class anxieties is also thorough and pretty bold. She's not exactly likeable, but she's in trouble; she is not particulary deep, but she feels real enough. Particular note has to be made of Lohman's performance too and, as ever, the effects work is exemplary.

My initial review shows how I started off a little lukewarm, but coming back to "Drag Me To Hell" reveals that this may be the cleverest Raimi film so far. It is like a Jacques Tournier/Val Lewton film made by Looney Tunes. I can take or leave the slapstick violence, as incidentally enjoyable as it may be, but as a comedy-horror about failing mental health, this has the weight of subtext that truly elevates horror, and shows what horror can do like no other genre. Here's the cliche: demons of the mind. It also means that "Drag Me To Hell" is bona fide tragedy, and for that I like it more than ever.

People call it a classic, but I am no longer about to quibble that so easily, although my reasons may differ.

A Swedish Love Story

2010-05-16T19:39:00.005+01:00

A SWEDISH LOVE STORY / EN KARLEKSHISTORIA
Roy Andersson, 1970, Sweden

What is distinguished about Roy Andersson’s portrayal of adolescent love is the respect, the unwavering reverence with which he treats the romance of his young protagonists. We may be amused at their affectation of supposed adult ‘cool’, with their leather jackets and mopeds and miniskirts and attention to make-up and posing, but these are also the core of their evolving characters. There is no denying the confidence with which they carry themselves. It is impossible not to recognise ourselves in them: furtive looks, raw feelings, tenderness. When Par (Rolf Sohlman) receives Annika (Anne-Sofie Kylin) at his family’s country home, he can barely stop smiling to be around her. These are agreeable protagonists, not immediately approachable or conventionally affable, for we will never be allowed access to their full inner-workings; but they are fully rounded characters.

Andersson’s debut wears very little friction between the loose influence of Czech New Wave naturalism and the clearer, infamous stylistic formalism of his later films (""Something Happened", "Songs From The Second Floor", "You, The Living"), although the opening does inform us that this is theatre with the rise of a curtain. Andersson’s obsession with detail serves his young couple well, not only in their dress sense and mannerisms, but also their less guarded mannerisms and casual body-language (e.g., the random way Par clucks his tongue nonchalantly after having been caught romancing in Annika‘s bedroom). It also generates a wholly convincing milieu for them to live in and explore: from nursing homes, clubs and the streets, to Annika’s bedroom and the country retreat. Rarely do films feel so of a time and place without feeling dated.

Andersson’s respect for his protagonists is served further by technique: after a split between the couple due to Par’s humiliation and near unbearable shame at being beaten by another boy, the break-up is resolved in a glorious scene where Par mopeds across the yard back into Annika’s arms. The scene uses a melancholic swell of music, strings that manage not to turn the evident melodrama of the moment trite, but rather serious, heroic and moving. The moment creates a dry humour in evoking those big scenes of reconciliation that resolve so many romantic narratives: he is James Dean, Elvis, whoever, awkwardly jumping off of the moped to rush back to her. But more than this, when they are reconciling, the music swells to drown out their spoken intimacies and the camera steps back from close-up to wide-shot to allow them their privacy. It is a moment of sublime cinematic generosity and regard for the characters.

But once they are at the country home, Andersson retreats from the couple completely and we are left with the adults. Throughout, we have been shown the adults as a counterpoint to the young romantics, apparently to reveal what a loveless adulthood becomes, to show what the teenagers are not, or even what they might become. No, we don’t really believe they will become their parents, but the possibility remains. The adults are tediously angst-ridden and distraught, melodramatic and childish in a way Par and Annika are not. Annika’s parents are trapped in an apparently loveless marriage where the mother sobs and the father is given to pompous declarations of bitterness. With Par’s parents being more settled (regardless of their concerns about ill grandparents and business in a time of economic strife), the dramatic focus falls on Annika’s parents, in particular her father’s self-loathing and boorishness. He is driven to distraction by a sense of failure, his temper and a desire to see his indifferent daughter deliver vengeance on the world on his behalf. This focus seeks to trump the Swedish love story who are conspicuous in their absence - Par and Annika have snuck away to be intimate - and the adult histrionics are crass and far less involving than the delicacies of the teenagers. Earlier, a scene involving installing a pair of swing doors in the house is almost farcical in the way the family turn it into a confrontation of the value of the action and the meaning of life. But later, there is little of the satirical, mocking qualities to the last act, as typical of Andersson’s subsequent films; yet the party hats and bibs provide some welcome surrealism, although this too is slightly at odds with the preceding naturalism. Ultimately, there is the feeling that a wrong-turn has been taken, as if the narrative has wandered into another Bergman-influenced film of broken angst-ridden families, leaving the love story somewhat stranded and an aftertaste of dissatisfaction. Like Par and Annika, we really had little to learn from the adults.

Nevertheless, this remains a towering, beautifully made tribute to first love, to the main protagonists and the range of feeling and intelligence held by youth. A rare film that sees its main characters not so much as puppets and ciphers ruled by narrative, but as the personification of the raw, rare and vital intimacies of adolescent discovery and character; and in that way, and more than that, as people in their own right.

Kick Ass

2010-05-16T19:24:00.006+01:00

KICK ASS
Matthew Vaughn, 2010, USA

When "Kick Ass" first came out, Mark Millar And John Romita Jnr’s comic was an instant phenomenon. The film came out seemingly when the comic had barely finished. That is, barely finished volume one. It’s concept is simple: what if a comic book nerd took it upon himself to dress up and fight crime in the real world? He tries it out, gets hospitalised a couple of times, has some success when his fighting a bunch of thugs gets filmed and uploaded to Youtube. In fact, he becomes an internet and cultural phenomenon. At this point, there is much blood and guts, some lowkey adolescent humour and wish-fulfilment fantasy and not just a dash of self-loathing. "Kick Ass" looked like it may have something to say. And then the story introduces Big Daddy and Hit Girl and Red Mist and organised crime. The comic moved into "Batman" and "Daredevil" territory. Big Daddy was a "Punisher" like vigilante figure with a pre-adolescent ninja daughter. The defining image of "Kick Ass" became not so much "Kick Ass" in his ski suit, but Hit Girl covered in gore from head to toe.

Which you are not going to see in the film adaptation. Announcements of the film adaptation came early in the comic’s first run (reprints with variant covers were catnip for collectors and fooled others into buying editions they already owned) and my first thought was, How the hell are they going to do that? The fact that Matthew Vaughn’s film - writing with Jane Goldman - is not the total compromise that might have been expected is remarkable. Even the fact that a mainstream film going by a mildly swearing title seems remarkable (that, along with "Inglourious Basterds", has Hollywood ever offered such a mild-sweary-title season?). It surely indicates how the ultra-violence and taboo-breaking of the alternative art scene has gone mainstream. So maybe Dave Lizewski - a.k.a. Kick Ass - is older than I imagined from the comic, and as played by Aaron Johnson he is surely more American every-nerd, and far less ugly and manipulative than his comic book counterpart. But Hit Girl is still an eleven-year-old super-psycho. So: sure, we get a hoodlum being microwaved, but the film simply leaves out much of the hand-on super-gore, and it inevitably has to. Hit Girl barely gets a bloody splatter upon her. We don’t get the nasty "Kick Ass" torture session, complete with his testicles being frazzled. And also, rather than the bloodbath finale of the comic, we get a thrilling and funny and totally comic-book showdown, complete with bazookas and jetpacks. It goes for broke and quietly detaches itself from the potential realistic ties the initial concept promises. So, yes, the film is toned down, but the fact that it is a huge mainstream success is - to repeat myself - remarkable.

The truth is that it was obvious halfway through the first volume that "Kick Ass" really had nothing profound to say about the little guys dressing up and playing at being crime fighters. You shook it and it was hollow, so that it’s phenomenon was based upon the shock-value of under-age killers and buckets of gore and bad taste. It is more "Sin City" crossed with indie coming-of-age tale rather than for fans that really, really want "The Dark Knight" to come true. Rather than engaging with the problematic murderous consequences of vigilantism, with all the grey areas and troubled morality, "Kick Ass" fuelled itself on Dave Lizewski’s good intentions and how cool the unstoppable slaughter-machine Hit Girl was. Recent Batman is frequently more focused on the difficult ethical shadows that he moves in than the ostensibly more realist "Kick Ass". In actuality, Romita and Millar conceived the Big Daddy and Hit Girl storyline first, and then stepped back for the Kick Ass story, which does create some critical distance, but serves mostly to accentuate Lizewski’s loser qualities and envy of real hero-murderers. It left me queasy in never once noticing or questioning any humanity of the bad guys. They were comic book bad guys, useful for humour and body count.

The film adaptation bears all the good and bad points of the comic and holds with the trajectory of becoming increasingly fun but less poignant. What we are in fact left with is good old guilty pleasure exploitation entertainment. Not as clever as it thinks it is, the comic "Kick Ass" remained compelling, mostly for the WTF factor. But not only that, because it also had a couple of neat twists that you may not have been expecting. These twists are lost in the film because the adaptation has so much more bad guy back story: so we know that Red Mist is a villain from the start (and he doesn’t get turned on by torture either, making him a genuine sadist), because we know the bad guy plot to nab the good guys (as dubious as that ‘good guy’ status may actually be); we see Big Daddy and Hit Girl overcome early so that the comic’s surprise that they have actually been caught is also gone. The narrative surprises, therefore, are lost in adaptation.

The film makes up for this with lashing of bonus humour and a comic book aesthetic that stays on the right side of drowning out story. Thankfully it also eschews much of the tedious angst that hobbles Peter Parker and the characters of "Heroes" (the kind that is meant to make them more human, but actually makes them repetitive and wearisome). The first fights Kick Ass engages in both have their moments: in the thrill of the moment, Kick Ass gets knifed and we feel very much thrown back in the real world for a moment; in the second, he shames the thugs into giving up, which is the last time the film will recognise the complexity of confrontations. The fight scenes are thrilling, kinetic and visceral, shocking and fun. Considering how Manga Hit Girl is, Vaughn films and edits in a way that manages to keep her killing sprees all looking within the edges of plausibility, using her size and light weight for her advantage in running up bookcases and slipping under the range of adults. We go with it.

As everybody now know, this is Hit Girl’s film. Everyone else is good - I am fond of Christopher Mintz-Plasse’s geek style (and vengeful geek style hopefully helps nudge him out of the typecasting he has to struggle against since McLovin') and Nicolas Cage puts in another bizarre performance - I always imagined Big Daddy as more Henry Rollins, but Cage turns him into a vengeful comic book artist gone psychotic. But it is Chloe Mortez that makes Hit Girl her own, exceeding what is on the page. She invests Hit Girl with a sweetness and humanity that the comic doesn’t touch. And so we go on to forget how troubling the character concept is and celebrate its outrageousness and Mortez’s dazzling performance. Why shouldn’t girls have some fun and trump the guys for once?

As a piece of superhero geek-and-gore vigilante excess, "Kick Ass" is an instant hit. It is a sunnier version of the comic book source, and a damned site nicer to its put-upon would-be hero. these are not necessarily bad changes. It manages to have it's cake and gorge itself too. When Hit Girl uses night-vision, one can also feel themselves playing the tie-in game. When our heroes are tortured and are about to be executed on television, the audience are glued, and when the TV pulls the plug, everyone just moves over to the internet stream. No one seems bothered by watching, and in fact they seem incapable of not watching, apparently only able to process horror as taboo-breaking entertainment, and apparently never able to pull themselves away from entertainment. It is surely too much to read this as a criticism of the very audience watching. Shock IS entertainment, "Kick Ass" persists, but it doesn't go too deep. And that is exploitation cinema and so somehow it pulls it off. Unencumbered by moral reflection and letting go of the reality shackles early on, it’s a funny, thrilling and totally winning guilty pleasure.

Schock

2010-05-16T19:15:00.005+01:00

SHOCK / SCHOCK
Mario Bava, Italy, 1977
a.k.a.: "Beyond the Door II"

It is surely one of the great unsolved mysteries of cinema why Italian shockers feel that free-form funk-rock is the sound of horror. Take the rather good opening tracking shock through a currently deserted house in Mario Bava’s "Shock": we know this is a horror film, so we naturally expect that this will be a place of fear and frights… but the decidedly jamming music accompanying this shot means we should perhaps play air-bass and shake our stuff. Maybe there will be wine and some little cheesy treats to signify European decadence. The impression is often that the score of another film has accidentally walked onto the set of what we’re watching. When this achieves a wonderfully bonkers effect, this is usually Ennio Morricone; when it is contradictory, it is usually some members of Goblin that are responsible. The soundtrack here is by Libra and is, perhaps aside from the theme, for the most part good, atmospheric and experimental in the best way.
Which goes for "Shock" in general. The funky theme song and some slightly stilted dialogue promise the kind of anything-goes, random plotting and narrative that characterise many Italian giallo and horror films, but "Shock" soon tightens up to something more straightforward and haunting. This time, the mishmash of cash-in features actually increases its range and curiosity value: the post-"Omen" creepy/psychic/possessed kid; an apparently haunted house; a woman with amnesia, recovering from a breakdown and increasingly on the verge of another; some psychic supernatural action; a mild giallo murder mystery. Sometimes a film can shake together a pastiche of regular genre motifs and reach for something more, transcending its obvious derivations and generating some originality and fascination. The best b-movies do this. Bava was influenced by Stephen King, but come the end it is equally "The Shining" and Roman Polanski’s "Repulsion". The story also goes that "Shock" was directed by both Mario and his son, Lamberto - but Lamberto never managed anything so otherworldly and surreal on his own.

Although there is probably not enough sustained ambiguity as to whether there really is haunting-possession going on or if it is all in Dora’s mind (Dora being played by Dario Argento’s wife, Daria Nicolodi), "Shock" manages to have its cake and eat it too. It cannibalises all of its influences and builds up a quite a disturbance with a little hysteria and strong nightmare sequences which have the flavour not only of "Repulsion", but also of Ingmar Bergman. Moments such as the plane crash induced by the haunting has more in common with the Seventies psychic phenomenon horrors (e.g., "Patrick", "The Medusa Touch"). There is some surprising subtlety: left unpunctuated by overdone melodrama, a moment such as the child simply telling his mother he has to kill her is left unnervingly un-confronted. Occasionally, Bava truly transcends, as when a love-making scene seems under the touch of a ceramic hand (a masterful shot); or when Dora seems to be caressed by otherworldly ecstasy and forces, her hair flowing as if underwater (apparently filmed using a revolving bed, a simple but mesmerising trick). It is these touches that make "Shock" memorable and distinctive, taking a handful of genre tropes and bringing them altogether with . Throw in some oedipal disturbance on this tale of domestic breakdown, psychics and ghosts and it is quite a full package.

It should be a mess, but the different strands keep pulling at mystery and the unpredictable so that the genre tropes are kept mostly in the air and pulled together with offbeat atmosphere, hanging upon the finely realised, memorable set-pieces. There’s no gibbering finale, just an over-long breakdown, some revelations and the inevitable deaths and a creepy open end.

Fearnet's 10 Greatest Horror Movie Music Themes

2010-05-13T13:02:00.007+01:00

Fearnet has a great, note-perfect choice of "10 Greatest Horror Movie Music Themes".

Myself, I am crazy about John Harrison's score for "Creepshow". Also: "Phantasm", "The Amityville Horror" (instant shudders from that music!)... and continuing that choir-like trend, "Children of the Corn".

I don't enjoy the "Friday the 13th" films, but Jason's musical cue is definitely a winner ("Kill!" "Ma!")

I also have a huge crush on Fantomas' "The Director's Cut", in which Mike Patton and esteemed friends re-interpret a bunch of film themes to crazed and wonderful effect. A number of choices are horror-related, not least "Ave Satani".

The Open Up And Bleeds

2010-04-25T17:55:00.010+01:00

THE OPEN UP AND BLEEDS

www.myspace.com/openupandbleeds

The first thing that you have to do in listening to The Open Up and Bleeds is turn up the volume. This Swedish, Stockholm based band demands you turn it up, possessing a big sound which helps break out of the punkish core that fuels it - a punk rock centre which they happily namecheck: Iggy Pop (obviously), The Stooges, Stiv Bators, Klaus Kinski, etc. Their first album is a fine expansion of what they have been developing for a while: the early recordings on their first EP was rougher with a decidedly storming-it-in-a-bar, almost rockabilly feel. Even then the band’s ease with pop-punk, rousing melodies and songs was obvious, never quite knowing whether to dance or start a fight. Singer/guitarist Joel Segerstedt alternated with a fuck-off and fuck-me attitude, one moment confrontational and the next introverted. One of my favourites from this first release is "Lonely City", about the ironic uniformity of the punk movement: "My little brother is a punk rocker," Joel declares, but the tone is dark, doomed and seemingly grieving. Get it at suicide records.

The next three-track EP revealed that The Open Ups had developed so that now they had less swagger and more epic venturing that included new wave synths and swirls and 10 minute odes to decay of the urban, suburban and personal kinds.

All this remains on their first album. They are quite the formidable unit. It is not that there is anything groundbreaking here, but that the songs are so complete and enjoyable. The Open Up and Bleeds run on words of discontent. Andreas Thunmarker’s drums alternate between patient pounding (e.g. on "OK is not OK) and thunderous explosions. The guitars by Joel and Markus Johansson roll, soar and spike. Thomas Meyer’s basslines sometimes slur, but often are the kind to run through the streets at night to.

The dissatisfaction is easy to feel… it’s in the slightly strangled but compelling vocals of Joel and the restlessness of the guitars. . The titles are a giveaway too: "OK is not OK", "I Don’t Want to Die", "In Darkest Hours". These are mid-tempo, brooding tracks depicting characters struggling with pessimism and disgruntlement, broken up by bursts of rocking out such as "This Noise". "I’m waking up in such a mess," Joel sings, and it’s thrilling and cathartic.

But it is not all bleak, because beneath this veneer of unhappiness, there are also semi-nostalgic tales of being in bands, as well as much evidence of affection in the numerous named people and small tales Joel tells. The title "Everyone I Know" comes with the suffix "is from bands I’ve been in" and leaves the fourteen year-old protagonist "stuck there" on a stage for the first time; whereupon the song also leaves him stranded adrift an instrumental passage that captures a frozen moment of nerves and self-doubt before giving relief with a final chorus burst. All this to a synthetic pulse that comes dangerously close to disco. Well, perhaps not quite disco, but it does work and is decidedly new wave. It is the inclusion of these pulses and sweeping synths and effects that help to boost the Open Ups’ sound, to help give each song a distinctive feel. With songs like "Stiv Bators in All of Us" and "Let’s Go Back to Modernism", it is hard to think of many songs that sound so tunefully desperate for a smack around.

And then there is "Cut Me A Live One", which finds the Open Ups at their most evocative: "crosses on your eyeballs/and scars upon your chest"; "body bags and stretchers/blocking every the door" (these lyrics are written by Markus; all other by Joel)).The music channels that other Swedish band of disillusionment Broder Daniel, a big and yearning sound whose haunting effects is helped immensely by the subtle, singalong layers of vocal. For me, this track is the true revelation of the album, near impossible to shake.

Rounding up with "The End", the album finishes on a 10 minute epic that feels like a gritty neo-realist European film about the disaffected and alienated. The rush of the whole album thins out into a cacophony of synths, designed to leave you hanging and lost.

And then you are done. It needs to be noted that there is grand, clear production by Henrik Svensson that is notable often in the inspired thunderous drum treatment and vocal layers. The Open Up and Bleeds will not be cast as pioneers, but the music is sweet, the energy infectious, the edginess and anxious essence casting ambiguity over the simplest of statements. It is an album for when you want to rock out; to run away to, to sing along to.

An evident act of love and hate, The Open Up and Bleeds album is a winner; one eye on the darkness and one on the dance floor. It’s a charged, thrilling time feeling bad. I won’t argue with that.

Lost in Space: on the Robinson homestead

2010-04-25T16:48:00.015+01:00

LOST IN SPACE:

series 1, episodes 4-8

4: There Were Giants in the Earth

5: The Hungry Sea

6: Welcome Stranger

7: My Friend, Mr. Nobody

8: Invaders from the Fifth Dimension

"nefarious plot... dupliciuous plan..."

4: "There Were Giants In The Earth" - Things have settled now. We know that each episode, Maureen Robinson (space-eyed June Lockhart) will be concerned and anxious; Dr. Smith will be duplicitous and scheming; Will Robinson will disobey his father’s orders and get a talking to later on after calamity has been diverted; Judy and Penny won’t do much and Don West will be stolid. To be fair, Penny almost endangers herself by, apparently, wandering off with her monkey alien just as the family are trying to relocate; ordinarily, endangering oneself is Will’s job, but Penny’s dilemma is short lived and this incident seems to serve only to kill time and to show off John Robinson in a jet-pack (jet-pack!). Early on, John makes a voice-over report and states that they know "nothing" about the animal life on the planet… except, of course, for the bizarrely trouble-free and domesticated monkey-alien and the turtle things briefly glimpsed when Penny rides one.

Giantism is the theme for this episode, as the somewhat odd title implies: giants in the earth?? We get giant vegetables this time to liven up a period of quiet given to seeing how the Robinsons try to set up their own little farmstead. But this proves only to be an indication of things to come as we next get full-on giant fanged cyclops alien action. Again, "Lost in Space" is like a whole sequence of Golden Age science-fiction magazine covers come to life, and the giant alien is a prize moment, simultaneously hilarious and gripping. The special effects are ambitious, fun and despite the low budget, engaging and credible enough; and you can’t go far wrong with a man in a furry suit and absurd headpiece.

But an even greater threat appears to be the impending freezing weather, and so the family sets out South to avoid being turned into Popsicles. The early stages of the journey includes a camp-side moment with Will Robinson playing "Greensleeves" on guitar! (For a moment, I wondered why Will was playing Leonard Cohen before I realised I was recalling Cohen’s cover version initially rather than the traditional original. But for a moment, Will Robinson playing Cohen was a surreal possibility. Bill Mumy will go on to have a long musical career, of course.) This is all without Dr. Smith, who has decided to stay back in the space-saucer to mince around and take his chances, not wanting to give up home comforts and test the nastiness of the outside world and, well, he is just damned contrary because he is the villain.

As the journey progresses, there is trouble in camp as Don West begins to show defiant strains of dissent against the imperious goodness of John Robinson. Don’s distrust of Dr. Smith makes him trigger-happy when Smith becomes less nefarious, has some kind of change-of-heart and tries to warn the Robinsons of the crazy orbit and weather changes of the planet which are likely to spell their doom. This all ends up with the Robinsons not having to go South after all and returning back to the Jupiter 2. But not before they run from electrical storms and take refuge in a cave of tombs - which ends up being a disappointingly brief exploration and peril. Sheesh, aren’t these guys curious about ancient alien civilisations at all? And -

5: "The Hungry Sea": - on the way home there is a fun battle with whirlpools as the frozen landscape they initially crossed has now melted into a violent sea. There is definitely delight in seeing the fragile-looking but apparently super-durable "chariot" making its way across frozen seas and rocky terrain, and then swimming to land - again, the miniatures work is pretty impressive and engaging. Much of the imagery of these early episodes is highly memorable and the sea storm is another that seems to exceed expectations. This particular odyssey ends with everyone back at Jupiter 2 and - evidently not wanting to be outdone by Will’s performance the previous episode - the Robot takes up the guitar and strums "There’s No Place Like Home". Will seems jealous of this, decrying the Robot’s choice as a din, apparently forgetting that his own earlier choice of "Greensleeves" was not exactly rock’n’roll. And then comes the sensation that a shark is being jumped.

The long-term storyline of the early episodes, outlining the Robinson’s take-off into space and their eventual shipwreck on an unnamed planet starts to break up now. The overarching continuity will fall into more independent instalments which resets the storyline every credit sequence. There has been evidence of this already, what with the giant (what, just one giant?), gigantic vegetables of episode four being totally forgotten subsequently, along with the potentially creepy and fascinating implications of a tombs they stumbled into. This pilgrimage into the cosmos is likely to offer up a lot of come-and-go perils to keep things going over the seasons. The next episode seems to hint at instant desperation after the Robinson’s brief excursion South to avoid the crazed weather patterns, and also to the way "Lost in Space" will progress.

"Yessirree, ain' we just jumping the shark early?"

6: "Howdy Stranger" immediately resorts to the guest star mode of keeping things going. And it’s a galaxy-travelin’ lone cowboy called James Hapgood that drops by the Robinson homestead (he‘s good and haphazard, I guess!), the kind that likes to spin yarns, whoop and fight and not stay any place long. We’ve already determined that the Robinsons are derived equally from pulp sci-fi and western pilgrimage adventures equally: the wholesomeness of the family, the campfire acoustic sessions, battles with the elements, the old-fashioned gender roles, the way they stop at the "roadside" to "give thanks" that they have survived perilous moments… it is all there. What we now have, which was not so obvious before, is a galaxy potentially full of solo-adventurers too, which makes the Robinsons far more straight-up pilgrims than pioneers and also means that a guest star might drop by at any moment. There is some slight endangerment from a weed-like contamination on the cowboy’s spaceship, but the real conflict here is the Robinson parents tension around the opportunity to send the children back to Earth, and then with Hapgood to convince him to take them. This does seem a little late in coming since the programme to send a family into space was at least a decade in the making (according to episode one); you would think the Robinsons were pretty certain of what exactly they were letting themselves in for, even if they concluded that it was the unknown. For a moment, Will has another alternative father figure (he doesn’t seem interested in looking up to Don West much and he tolerates Dr Smith like a difficult grandpa) and COWBOY as Hapgood puts in a good enough performance, not too broad. But, again, the haste with which the show had a guest astronaut stop by for a moment already nods to a show quickly run out of steam and unable to perpetuate an ongoing rather than episodic venture.

Evidently it is time for each Robinson to get their moment, and episode 7, which has the crummy title of "My Friend, Mr. Nobody", is all Penny Robinson’s. Feeling a little ignored and not taken seriously by the rest of the family, Penny wanders off alone in the alien landscape and hears voices and promptly gets herself an ’imaginary’ friend of sorts. It is, of course, an alien force, a disembodied voice in a cave mimicking and learning from her words. There is some initial creepiness, but this falls away to Penny’s sentimental and borderline hysterical attachment to this disembodied voice (girls, huh?). Finally, Penny’s loneliness takes flight into the stars. I’m sure she’ll be fine from now on. More curious, although in no way self-aware, is the subplot of the Robinsons blowing up the scenery looking for natural resources to use and exploit. The Robinsons just need to wipe out an indigenous tribe now to fit right in. Anyhow, this leads to Dr Smith conniving to have Don West exploding Mr Nobody’s cave in order to get at the diamonds there. That Mr Nobody turns out to be a brand new galaxy is kinda neat. That this galaxy calls back to say goodbye to "Pen-nnee" is daft.

The daftness of 8: "Invaders from the Fifth Dimension" is more pleasing. Somewhat inevitably, since most of the titles suffer from delusions of grandeur, it’s also more of an intrusion than an invasion. The invaders are apparently, and eerily enough, disembodied skullish and mouthless white heads that spout exactly the kind of preposterous platitudinous threats you would expect. They disdain the puny human mind and the primitive human sensation of "love" (which of course, will turn out to be the exact quality that defeats the interlopers). They want part of Dr. Smith’s brain and he, naturally, offers up one of the Robinson kids’ brains instead. Dr. Smith nefariously convincing Will Robinson to do something dangerous or counter-productive is one of the "Lost in Space" key highlights and special effects, as it were. Smith plays on Will’s good nature and fools him before the kid’s natural and equal intelligence, honesty and feistiness gets him out of trouble. This means he’s always a match for the Doc, even if unconsciously and even if constantly duped, and all without forfeiting that good faith he always has. It’s a stalemate of sorts, leaving their relationship always open for another round of manipulation and rebuff. And I’m not exactly looking for character development at this point.

Anyway, once the aliens are gone and Will is okay, everyone treats it like a bit of a romp and a joke. Nope, a little "invasion" ain’t going to phase the Robinsons.

Looks like "Lost in Space" will use visitors of one type or another to keep the storylines coming, rather than focusing on what it takes for the Robinsons and pals to survive. It’s easy and enjoyable, but the best has already been and gone, it’d predict. They aren’t doing much exploring now, really, but it looks like it’s going to get pretty busy whilst they’re stranded anyhow. Hey, and what about those giant Cyclops??

Same Time. Same channel.

You can't go wrong with spooky mouthless disembodied heads.

2 OR 3 THINGS I KNOW ABOUT HER

2010-03-12T22:11:00.007Z

2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle

Jean-Luc Godard, France, 1967

A film that is more essay than cinema? A film that could be referred to by any outsider to confirm the stereotype of Continental cinema as a litany of smoking, pontificating, posing, and smoking; of studied indifference and existential angst. (Yes, I put smoking twice).

An essay: everyone speaks with the same voice. This is the voice of Jean Luc-Godard himself, whispering a worried narration (perhaps annoying, this whispering, like a politicised fly buzzing and fretting in your ear as the film plays); the "I" of the title. Every character speaks in this voice, with these very same concerns and contributing to a homogenous viewpoint; they stop in their everyday routines to tell us, the audience, a thought or biographical sentence about themselves, without emotion, perhaps wanly; but mostly they are lost in introversion and existential reflection. Existence, objects, consumerism, detachment, female faces, globalisation, war, famine, fashion, and naturally: sex. People talk to one another as if in mid-seminar, relating to one another and the world around them only as concepts, themes, objects. Others sit in cafes reading random quote from a mountain of novels as if in mid-performance art.

Paris: the "her" of the title, the city being built up even as Godard narrates his concerns and characters reflect his insights. Buildings. Constructions. Erections. Civilisation. Prostitution. Parisian.

"An article which appeared in the Le Nouvel Observateur relates to a deep-rooted idea of mine. The idea that in order to live in Parisian society today, one is forced, on whatever level, on whatever scale, to commit an act of prostitution in one way or another, or to live according to the laws that govern prostitution." (dvd booklet, pg. 46)

Non. We do not truly learn anything of Paris. We do not learn from this essay what it truly means to "prostitute" oneself. We do not learn what it is to be a wage slave, trapped in one or two jobs just to feed the children. We do not feel the humiliation of a secretary having to literally "give" herself to her boss in order to keep her job. We do not see a scenario in which a man is so consumed by work that he loses all connection to his family. That kind of thing. The kind of "prostitution" on display here is closer to a dalliance, a detached flirtation with the idea of the apparent oldest profession in the world defining everyday bourgeois existance.

Pose: gorgeous French female portraits and profiles glamorise the screen. Women light up a cigarette, because they want to, and they air their existential ruminations to camera. Dour, smoking, very ’60s, disaffected, continentally bored. Marina Vlady is Juliette Jeanson, a housewife who defines herself in one word: indifference. A housewife that turns to prostitution. A housewife who, when putting her kids to bed, suddenly stops for the audience - as her son bounces on the bed full of life, to reflect - "What does it mean to know something?" Which brings us to:

Humour: unintentional? Formal? Deliberate and satirical? The young son (young enough that you think he might only have just managed to get beyond "Le Petit Prince") tells his mother of a dream he has had about twins that merge into one person, which has a preposterous punch line: "And then I realised that these two people were North and South Vietnam being united." His later recital of his homework about friendship and whether it is or is not possible between boys and girls is equally deadpan and hilarious.

And then there is the gratuitous moment of a woman having her bath interrupted by a gas meter reader who just wanders in. Pure farce. Or the apparent "crèche" run by an old man who keeps reminding the amorous couples in the adjacent rooms that they have only a few minutes left.

Or the visit to the hotel by Juliette and her friend for a bit of naughtiness with a journalist running from the experience of Vietnam, a scene that offers two choice moments: first: Juliette - in a moment of disconnected reflection as the girls undress and get to work for the journalist - sits by a lamp, says to herself and the audience, "Paris is a mysterious city," and poignantly turns the lamp on "…asphyxiating…" and off "… natural…" and on and off; and the man says, "Why doesn’t she come over?" as if oblivious to her moment of artiness, to the fact that she is breaking through the wall between actress, character and audience. And Second: the journalist - wearing a T-shirt with an American flag on it (!!) - has the women walking back and forth undressed with Pan-Am and T.W.A. flight bags over their heads. Absurdism to puncture the veneer of suffocating consumersim and circumstantial and literal prostitution, non? C’est comedie!!

Despite the loose-limbed New Wave feel, there is no accommodation of the trivial, of the simply pleasurable, of the inconsequential to mitigate this dissertation on Paris and prostitution 1967, and therefore unintentional humour may seep in. The 10 year-old says "Mummy, what is language?", to which she answers, "Language is the house that man lives in." Yes. Yes that is how such inter-generational conversations between such characters go. The austerity and the very un-likeliness combined is amusing.

Essay and pose: There is no story, no emotional core, no real bracing neo-realism, just nice clean imagery, sharp alluring colours, and a wonderful, bright ‘60s feel. This is not Bergman, whose metaphysical and existential concerns are merged near-seamlessly within story and characters. This is not even Goddard’s "Le Petit Soldat" (1963), a polemic married to a fragmented but recognisable story. Here, there is only Godard, rejecting narrative, spoken from whispers on the one hand and attractive women on the other. Aside from the compelling portraits of pretty faces, there are wonderful moments where the size and unknowability of the cosmos and, indeed, of the unknowable itself, are captured in close-ups of a swirling coffee, or a burning cigarette. Then there is the bustle of urban life distilled in the busy editing of the garage sequence. A sketchpad of contemporary angst in a nice, bold modern binding, complete with funny doodles. Composition and colours are often resonant of comic book panels (see Drew Morton).

Let me end with a confession. Let me ask what is the truth of my opinion about "Two or Three Things I know About Her…", how has it imprinted itself upon my privileged, lofty, detached judgment? Let me say that I am amused. I don’t necessarily find it profound, but it is entertaining as a cinematic dissertation. But I am more a Francois Truffaut kind of man.

My "favourite" horror films of the last 5 years... (2005-2010)

2010-03-11T12:46:00.009Z

Having been given this challenge by a friend of mine, I was surprised to find I got my list up pretty quickly. The list soon overran, but let's go with the primary ten first:

"Let The Right One In" (2009)
"Martyrs" (2009)
"[.Rec]" (2007)
"The Descent" (2005)
"The Orphanage" (2007)
"Ils/Them" (2007)

"The Mist" (2008)
"The Road" (2009)
"Hansel & Gretel" (2007)
"Halloween" (2007)

And then/Honorary mention:
"Wolf Creek" ("2005")
"Vinyan" ("2008")
"The Hills Have Eyes" (2006)
"Dek Hor"
"28 Weeks Later" (2007)

What do I divine from this list? That 2007 was a bumper horror year. That I really dig the grimy neo-realism of the Twenty-First century extreme horror wave. That a lot of "video nasty" era trimmings are now mainstream. That I really like the fairytale horror aesthetic too. I'm not big on happy endings either. ...Also: I think I missed some good Asian horror and probably a bunch of under-the-radar b-horrors I missed also, the kind you would stumble upon in the golden era of the highstreet video store.

I believe that "Wolf Creek" was also better than its detractors say. Half the films in the list above have key problems, but few films don't. I have seen "Hansel and Gretel" accused of a thin story (not really), and "28 Weeks Later" has calamities triggered by dumb character behaviour, but... well... sometimes a film is good enough for allowances and forgiveness to be given. For example, "28 Weeks Laters" injects a welcome seriousness and attention to mounting fear that push it beyond its formula; plus an opening that may well bustle for "fantastic opening sequence" position with "Dawn of the Dead" (2004).

"28 Weeks Later" comes from my 'fun horror' pile, and I note that there is not enough from this pile that made the list; modest films that I felt transcended its format through execution and gusto (No, I wouldn't count "Zombieland" and "Shaun of the Dead" appears to be 2004; "30 Days of Night" (2007) is enjoyable enough but ultimately evaporates upon reflecction). This "fun pile" has little to do with humour and more to do with the enjoyment of genre tropes well presented. "The Mist" starts and runs as fun and - though there are plenty who did not like it - that ending shoves it off the deeper end into something far more troubling and vital. More fun: The "Orphanage" scores for having a couple of scenes that genuinely gave me the scares and having a genuinely heartbreaking explanation at the end... like "Hansel and Gretel", it overcomes weaknesses through beautiful execution and simple allegiance to the ghost story, moving into pure storytelling. "Hansel & Gretel" could very well be in a tie with "Dek hor", an equally creepy/sweet and beautifully executed ghost story.

Not since "The Blair Witch Project" has hand-held camera felt so vindicated and brilliantly utilised as in "[.Rec]", a point-of-view stance that dragged the viewer deeper and deeper until backing itself into a corner of the genuinely nightmarish. It also allowed for wonderful long takes. An excellent formal approach at the service of the genuinely scary unfolding zombie tale (and you can keep your "Cloverfield"). "The Descent" had a similar shrinking into a nightmare-space trajectory, and ended up a bizarrely emotional experience, seeming from out of nothing more than the standard monster movie dilemmas - something so few manage.

Blahblahblah "torture porn", etc. "Martyrs" and "Ils" took few prisoners. Both felt infused with genuine social awareness, commentary and outrage - especially "Martyrs", whereas contenders such as "Frontiers" felt forced and probably hollow and "Shaitan" felt ultimately undernourished. Both "Martyrs" and "ils" were scary for different reasons.

"Haut Tension" felt like a good con trick, but a con trick nontheless, but director Alexandre Aja scored better with me with "The Hills Have Eyes"; perhaps not as 'clever', but a more straightforward, gruelling, silly and grimy remake of the Craven original that holds up well as a nasty piece of gore-and-scares.

My feelings towards "Halloween" remain: it will stand future scrutiny.

Yes, I am calling "The Road" a horror film.

I suspect "Vinyan" could well find weakenesses in one of the top ten and take it's place; upon reflection the film reveals strength and strength and odd places for the ghost story (yes?) that feels pretty damned original and authentic.

As a mixture of post-modern horror and pure story, "Let The Right One In" is sublime. The horror genre at the height of its abilities. I need say no more.

THE ROAD

2010-01-31T19:40:00.005Z

1: "the text…" 1:
According to director John Hillcoat, Cormac McCarthy felt that the voiceover in the film adaptation of his novel "The Road" was "indispensable".[1] It isn’t. It is another example of superfluous narration that gives the impression of behind-the-scenes concerns that the audience does not get the set-up without it spelt out to them. And this is a tricky set-up. The world has fallen apart, nature is crumbling, burning, dying all around and humanity has been lost. There are people, but humanity is in very, very rare supply. Into this world, a couple have a boy, a child who has not known the civilisation, wildlife and bright colours of the world that has been before. This world is full of falling trees, ash and cannibals. The woman cannot bare to live in such a world, and the man is left to spend his days desperately defending his son and preparing him for the worst. Which includes teaching the boy to shoot himself should it become necessary.

McCarthy’s novel is a true horror novel, terrifying in its depiction of a human race in its death throws of paranoia, distrust, violence, cannibalism and desperation. This then is the last brick separating a person from the inhumane: cannibalism. The "good guys" are those that don’t resort to it, but the good guys are in rags, increasingly frail and ill and dependant upon sheer luck and suspicion to get through. These too may not be enough, or ultimately right. Pretty early on, McCarthy indicates that this is a world where the worst will happen. The fragility of the boy and the fears of the man are upsetting and scary, reminding the reader of their mortality and helplessness against overwhelming threats. McCarthy does not write with the density of, say, his Border Trilogy, nor really with the stripped down efficiency of "No Country for Old Men". Rather he whittles his sentences down into prose-poem, a skeletal dance of vignettes and stark repetitions. But father and son argue, and through this we see that the boy is one of the last carriers of conscience. Conscience and kindness are the ultimate salvation McCarthy offers in a Godless, imploding, violent world.

This prose contains an illusive magic of grim poeticism and precision that does not carry over into voiceover. Hillcoat creates some stunning end-of-the-world visuals with isolated cabins, dead docks with tomblike ships, endless bleak roads and end-of-nature scenarios such as the man and boy caught in a falling forest, or the bleak litter-covered beach drained of colour. There have been so many faux-poetic and unnecessary narrations aspiring to what McCarthy achieves on page that when spoken it feels the same, and ultimately unnecessary. All the brutal beauty of the words are conveyed by the film visually, and that is as it should be.

2: "as the world eats itself…"
It probably looks just as you imaged as a reader. Ironically, in rendering beautifully stark vistas successfully, this may actually be one of the keys to Hillcoat’s adaptation’s weakness. It stands alone as a great and uniquely downbeat film to come from the Hollywood machine - typically and predictably, they seem to have had problems knowing how to market it - but somehow the grey visual splendour and the somewhat sentimental musical cues by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis compromise much of the ruthlessness of McCarthy’s original text. The majority of reviewers find the film lacking in comparison, but isn’t that usually the way, nine times out of ten, with adaptations? There is much damning with faint praise, as with Phillip Kemp:

"Still, [McCarthy’s] tone, that elusive tone, is absent. If the film misses the resonance, the sad deep anger of McCarthy’s work, it’s a creditable shot at it; but for one of the most powerful and original novels of the past decade, creditable doesn’t quite cut it." [1]

But there is so much that rings right in the film, and taken aside from its inspiration, it’s such a grand achievement in itself that it is hard to see how it might have been improved upon. It is one of the definitive post-apocalypse/post-civilisation texts ever written. Just as McCarthy deprived his modern westerns like "All the Pretty Horses" of pleasurable machismo and vengeance fantasies, and just as he stripped "No Country for Old Men" of the same plus the thrill of a showdown, in "The Road" he deprives the end of the world of the survivalist thrills and big special effects so common in, say, Hollywood disaster epics. All this is to force the action of the novels to give way to the metaphysical and the increasing interrogation of violence; of its justifications, its effects, its catharsis and randomness, to lay it naked. In "The Road", there is very little else but the fear of what people will do to one another in order to survive. And then, later, you realise that it is more about what someone will do to protect the ones they love.

It also shares much of the same feel and despair as Robert Kirkmans’ seminal zombie-survival magnum opus "The Walking Dead", possibly the most genuinely traumatic graphic novel/comic serial ever written (and illustrated by Charlie Adlard). With landmark texts such as Richard Matheson’s "I Am Legend" and Harlan Ellison’s "A Boy And His Dog", there are a lot of open horror and action motifs. But it would surely backfire for Hillcoat to have upped the horror ante - we have seen Romero’s living dead and ‘crazies’, after all - or to have spiced up the thrills with Mad Max homages. You can keep your "2012", "The Day After Tomorrow" extravaganzas. Kemp feels the unforgettable cellar of horror is bungled by Hillcoat, but again I would suggest that Hillcoat understands that McCarthy wants the horror of it, but not the Horror Genre gruesome delight of it, which would veer dangerously into neglecting the humanity of the skeletal cellar victims. It is the screams that come soon after this seen that are unforgettable. (Then again, the flare gun death is sure to burn itself into your memory).

3: "and the end of the world…"
McCarthy is barely even interested in the bigger picture; well, he is in metaphysical terms, but what remains brightest here is in reducing the struggle for humanity to what is essentially a two-man chamber piece. We don’t need to know the back story as to why everything is turning to dust. There are brief side-characters. There is a great fireside conversation between the man and Robert Duvall as Ely, an old man, but many of the encounters become distressing by succumbing to violence, distrust and humiliation. The flashbacks try to open things up a little, but they feel mostly like intrusions into the pale austerity of the rest of the film. Mostly, it is for Viggo Mortenson and Kodi Smit-MacPhee as man and son to carry the film, and they do. Mortenson is convincingly haggard, with the trademark flare still in his eyes, and although Smit-MacPhee never looks emaciated enough, his baffled vulnerability and fledgling defiance are palpable. The rapport is convincing and if you are going with the story, your heart is sure to be broken.
Hillcoat says:

"Cormac said that it’s a book about human goodness. It’s frustrating when people label film as bleak because the bleakness is just a backdrop. Unfortunately, everyone seems to focus on the backdrop. … The gestures towards hope that the film makes, the finding of the Coke can, the frolic in the fountain are that much more special because of the tremendous obstacles that the characters are up against" [3]

Well yes; the obstacles are that very bleak backdrop which renders those moments "more special"; they do not exist without one another. It is one of the wonderful mysteries of this story that it is as cathartic and emotionally rewarding as it is, despite or/and because of the dark context. But it seems Hillcoat has surely missed the irony in choosing the finding of the Coke can as a moment of hope - really? A potential symbol of the very civilisation that potentially brought about the end of the natural world? Perhaps the definitive symbol of American capitalist branding decadence? But I am surely being facetious: Hillcoat is sure to mean that the Coke represents a world of flavour and colour that has been lost. Myself, I prefer the moment where the boy stares at the mounted head of a stag: although little is made of the moment, we can fathom for ourselves that he has never seen such a thing before and the fascination it must hold for him. No, that is not a moment of hope, but it seems to me to perfectly capture the void between the boy’s world and everything the man knows to be lost. It’s a quietly powerful and upsetting moment and is surely the film at it’s unforced best.

It may not exceed the novel, but "The Road" is an excellent rendition. An besides, it does not have to: it has to stand by itself, and it does. Once taken aside from the daunting original text [4], Hillcoat’s film will undoubtedly stand the test of time as one of the most uncompromising and humane of American films.
***

[1] Jonathan Romney, "The Wasteland", Sight and Sound magazine, February 10, volume 20 issue 2, pg.76
[2] Phillip Kemp, "The Road", review, Sight and Sound magazine, February 10, volume 20 issue 2, pg.76
[3] Jason Wood, "Ashes to Asphalt"; Curzon magazine, issue 18, January-February 2010; editor: Nadia Attias; AquatintBSC, pg. 31
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[4] I am a McCarthy fan, and I read often how important "The Road" is, how remarkable the prose is, that it is one of the most relevant novels of the decade, etc, and very little of this would I disagree with; or at least I do not care to find much fault with it. Again: I thought it an excellent work of horror and humanity. But my friend Omar has written a hilarious and accurate parody of McCarthy’s style in "The Road", one which also reveals how its repetitions, cadence and economy are vulnerable to readings of pretension, ponderousness, and cul-de-sac progression. I don’t agree, but the satire is also sharp and amusing. I wish to share some of this here, because I dig it, with Omar's permission: full text here: http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendId=392354316&blogId=454606104

Review of Cormac McCarthy’s: The Road

On The RoadThe man picked up the little book. He read it. It was slow. Very slow. Slow as falling ashes. It didnt matter how big they made the fonts. Or how wide the margins and gutters. Or how large the spaces between the lines. It was long. Very long. And slow. Like ashes. And as he trundled his way through the little book he thought This is a piece of crap. What does trundle mean? the little book asked.
I dont know.
You dont know.
No.
Is it a good word?
It cost a lot of money.
A long time ago.
A long time ago.
How much?
Twenty five cents.
Was that a lot?
That was a lot.
For a word.
Okay.
Okay.

And he trundled through the little book.
You said that word again.
I know.
Its okay.
Okay.

And he kept trundling through the little book. Even turning the pages was slow. Slow as death. Slow as ashes on your face. Time was slow. It was especially slow when reading the little book. But he kept trundling through the little book because two friends recommended it the same week. Not that he thought it would ever get better after the first ten pages. He knew it wouldnt. He wasnt seeing it through for hope but curiosity. And as he trundled through the pages they seemed to turn very quickly but very slowly at the same time.
You keep saying that word.
I know.
Im scared.
Yes. I know.
Do we have to keep reading this?
Yes.
Because were the good guys?
Yes. Because were the good guys.
I want to quit.
Youre scared.
Yes.
Dont be scared.
Okay.
Okay.

And as the man trundled through the little book he realized there was something deliberate about it. It was almost like the little book was going to curl up and die every few pages. But it didnt. There was always a little miracle. The little book would suddenly stumble over a few thousand words. Perhaps hidden in a cellar. Perhaps in a kitchen. And then he would feed the little book and give it a bath. But even a little trudgerous almost titillation couldnt save it. Trundlous.
Sorry.
Trundlous.
Its okay.
Okay.

Deliberateness was hiding there. It was in the short sentences. In the occasional twenty five cent word. In the deliberate spelling and punctuation errors. In the obvious spelling mistakes someone missed. In the tedious repetitive sentence constructions. In the formatting. In the word count. Yes. The word count. It seemed like the little book was only trundling along to reach a word count. A promise. Maybe to an editor. Maybe a publisher. Maybe a lawyer. Or wife. Or debt collector. Or film maker. Anyway the man soon realized he couldve written this turkey himself in a weekend and he was insulted. Very insulted.
Youre exaggerating again.
Yes. I am.
You promised not to do that.
Okay.
You wont do it anymore.
I wont do it anymore.
You promise.
I promise.
Whats a turkey?
Whats a turkey?
Yes.
An ugly bird.
Theres never going to be anymore are there?
I hope not.
Im scared.
Dont be.
Okay.
Okay.

TALES FROM THE CRYPT (1972)

2010-01-31T19:21:00.005Z

Freddie Francis, 1972, GB

Much of the appeal of the Amicus anthologies come from their contemporary milieu: casually 1970s in detail, décor, pacing and a general era staidness that place the horrors in authentic ambience. These low budget efforts profit from a lack of embellishment and aesthetic that is almost derived from kitchen-sink television neo-realism. There is none of the lightness of touch of the ‘80s or the rush of narrative of much of post-80s horror. It’s Hammer-friendly (I won't exactly say Hammer-lite), with English stately homes and winding country roads and BBC accents, but also less stately and less aspiring. Amicus’ anthologies had fair allegiance to the trashy, the black-humoured moral retributions and quite thrills of those very comics from which this film took influence. Amicus also released their more famed anthology "Asylum" around the same time. If Hammer liked capes for its grim reapers, Amicus like bikers' leathers.

There is nothing special about any of the stories in "Tales From The Crypt", and their horrors were surely old material long before the comics they were taken from. Nevertheless, there is a general wryness and straightforward rendering that creates a palpable eeriness. Also, the film dashes through its tales so that the generic stories never outstay their welcome. Each of the tales have their moment.

"And All Through The House": The first tale in which Joan Collins murders her husband only to be terrorised by an escaped lunatic in a Santa Claus costume (!) takes place almost wordlessly over a banal selection of Christmas carols. It benefits tremendously from the drabness and warmth of the domestic setting and bland dialogue. It feels real enough and the black humour is unforced. I certainly remember the Seventies being that way.

"Reflection of Death": The second gives us a variation on Ambrose Bierce’s seminal short story "A Occurance at Owl Creek Bridge" again, with an additional unending nightmare twist also. It never quite involves itself with the grey area of the unfaithful husband not being quite the deserving cad these morality tales general offer - and Ian Hendry does much to inscribe his brief character with anguish and torn affections - but it does throw in one creepy reveal. In such brief horrors, that is all you need. The morality of these films in general is very conservative: the man is guilty of transgression of faithfulness, but from conflicted affections rather than cruelty, so the unending nightmare is surely overkill as a punishment? But these tales are all about righting the status quo and no transgressions are allowed.

"Poetic Justice": The third tale has a saddeningly aged and fragile performance by Peter Cushing (not Cushing, but the performance itself) as a doddery and persecuted old widow who just happens to dabble in black magic and one slow chill. The old man’s corpse casually walking into an ornate study, unnoticed by his persecutor and victim, is a wonderful creepy moment. Cruelty and snobbery are hand-in-hand and there will be terrible reprisals.

"Wish You Were Here": The fourth tale is cheeky enough to actually refer to its source material, W.W. Jacobs' "The Monkey’s Paw" by name, but does provide a neat scare using Death on a motorcycle, plus an unexpectedly gory hacking. It is the least of the stories. It is the desire to try and avoid one’s fate - here, it is bankruptcy and death - that is the contravention. Or perhaps it is because the couple seem privileged, moaning about their lot in a room so full of trophies of wealth and status that it looks like a bric-a-brac sale. Sometimes, these tales are just plain mean.

The last tale is the most outrageous: a heartless ex-army Major (Nigel Patrick) takes over the running of a home for elderly blind. When his neglect leads to the death of one of them, the men shuffle about like the undead and construct a somewhat bonkers revenge trap. The Major can be seen as the heartless aristocracy, buying expensive paintings from galleries for his office at the expense of food of substance for the shambling, unseeing underclass. For all his manners and diction, the Major’s true nature is represented by the vicious, trained dog … and aristocratic malice and greed will eat itself, come the razor-adorned corridors of revolution.

There is nothing particularly inspired about Freddie Francis’ direction, but he frames the important images well and, as mentioned, executes a number of excellent reveals when he needs to. It may be a little flat, but it is as swift as it is predictable, and still fun in its flickers of genuine horror and evocation of a different era and period of the genre.